The Militarization of the Police - Steve Martinot

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

The Militarization of the Police - Steve Martinot

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Mar 19, 2012 6:59 pm

A gem, worth printing and digesting in it's own right.

The Militarization of the Police
by Steve Martinot

The acquittal of the four officers who shot Amadou Diallo in the Bronx highlights its character as ritualistic murder. The sanctity of the police was not the sole meaning of that acquittal; it also constituted a more general approbation that rendered the killing itself unpunishible.

Narratively, the ritual unfolds as follows. The victim is seen by four hunters from their car. They get out, guns drawn. When one of them gives the signal (by performing the word "gun"), they opened fire. Nothing else transpires. The vestal victim is taken aback, takes a step backward into a vestibule, seeking only to identify himself, and dies. The ritual is performed in public. People are on the street, or looking out their apartment windows. And afterwards, incantations woven from rehearsed explanations are used to cloak the ritual's completion. First, he fit the profile of a rapist; second, this gave probable cause to assume he was armed and dangerous; third, in the absence of an attitude of obeiscence, he was assumed to be reaching for a gun. The police are carefully trained these days in the performance of this ritual through computer simulation exercises -- as pilots train with flight simulation programs. The jury adjudges the ritual authentically performed by acquitting. And its jury-sanctified meaning is confirmed the day following adquittal when another unarmed black man is shot to death by the police a few blocks from the Diallo scene. Though some in government express dismay, official satisfaction at the acquittal of Diallo's killers seemlessly becomes a vilification of the second victim, whose killers remain uncharged.

The political term for this is "impunity;" "impunity" names a hyper-political context in which the act (police shoots man) stands above both the police and the legal prohibition against murder. It is characteristic of military operations, and armies of occupation. And in urban areas, a form of militarization of police practices has taken place through an increasing deployment of technology, rhetoric, and tactics germaine to the military. Between traditional administration and new technologies of assault, the hyper-political space of impunity opens, transforming the organization of the judiciary, and society as a whole.

In his book Lockdown America, Christian Parenti gives an overview of the development of this militarization of police departments throughout the US.[1] He traces its growth from special detective branches, urban red squads, and tactical crowd control units to the eventual adoption of advanced weaponry, information technologies, aggressive military postures, SWAT teams, no-knock search and seizure procedures, and zero-tolerance ideologies. Many aspects of this development are adapted by-products of the Vietnam War, a war obsessed with anti-civilian tactics and technologies. They have been given national coordination and ideological uniformity through the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1973. And they have now become integral to the growth of prison populations, and the vast increase in construction, privatization, and industrialization of prisons (what has come to be called the prison-industrial complex).

Indeed, the fact that the US now has the largest prison population in the world, in both absolute and per capita terms, suggests the degree to which militarized policies are transforming judicial machinery, and even carpet-bombing various aspects of the Bill of Rights. And can ask what it means that a nation which prides itself on being "democratic" sees fit to lock more of its citizens behind bars than any other nation? One of the first elements of an answer would entail noticing that the highest rates of incarceration are reserved for black and brown people, who are swept into court systems and jails at rates 5 to 8 times their ratio to the total population. (LA,57ff) Fully 80% of the present prison population in the US is people of color. And two-thirds of them have been convicted of victimless, non-violent crimes. The proponderence of black and brown prisoners does not mean that whites do not commit crimes; it means that a judicial process is at work that has effectively decriminalized white crime. That is, the confluence of a hyper-criminalization of black or brown people with a decriminalization of whites constitutes a racialization of crime itself.

Parenti argues that the augmentation of police forces and prisons was a response to a classical Marxian over-accumulation crisis in the 1970s. The economy got caught between a profit squeeze and a strong labor movement, and sought to reassert political control. (LA,32) But he goes no further than such an historical materialist explanation; viz. that police repression was only to stem the economic crisis and return political control to a hierarchy whose domination had been temporarily eroded by social movements. He doesn't go behind the stories he provides, the many histories of abusive police operation, to excavate their inherent meanings. The social meaning of police power cannot be gleaned from endless stories of police abuse. Anecdotal accounts may represent the flavor of police operations, (LA,111) but they fragment it in their specificity. They leave unarticulated the general ideological irrelevance to the police of their victim's rights, citizenship, or humanity, as well as the question of recourse, or police brutality as a "crime problem" in its own right. Parenti simply projects that a resolution will eventually emerge from the inevitable overflow of "abuses of power" into the white middle class, threatening the veneer of "safety and security" that power is supposed to provide the mainstream. But more is at stake than that.

Profiling

Let us begin with the notion of profiling. The most familiar form is the traffic stop (made inordinately against people of color). A young black man driving a car may be stopped because the police claim he fits the profile of a car thief; thus they check registration, question the motorist, and search the car. But profiling involves more than traffic stops. People of color will be followed in department stores while whites are not. There is redlining of black or brown neighborhoods by banks, the withholding of loans, higher mortgage rates for people of color. People are refused jobs on the basis of color; a young person (of color) attempting to get a factory job has little chance of getting hired if the factory management deems his address to be in the wrong neighborhood. In sum, the operation of profiles rhetorically symbolizing high business risk or the probability of criminal activity have perfused the society. And because the profile, which outlines alleged characteristics by which a person becomes suspect, relies on visual recognition, it is per force of a racial or racializing nature.

A profiled traffic stop is one made on suspicion rather than a perceived violation. The motorist is thus detained while the police try to find something with which to charge him/her. It thus constitutes a form of harassment. When people of color are followed in department stores, it is also a form of harassment. The harassment is gratuitous because the profile is circular in construction; it is based on data that those who profile, whether the police, the banks, or department store security, have generated for themselves. That is, the preponderence of stops made of people profiled becomes an automatic data-filled rationalization for future profiled stops. When a person is deemed to fit the profile of an undesirable or overly risky business prospect, it is the profile that defines them as undesirable or risky. Its racialization is also circular. Because it functions through visual perceptions in the moment of a difference in appearance, it can only rely on a difference from what is not profiled, not noticed; that is, the profile exists only because the police have decided for themselves that others will not be profiled. In short, it is self-defining and self-referential. The origin of the profile lies in the act of profiling rather than in the situation or population profiled.

Though profiling clearly constitutes a form of discrimination, it does not constitute law enforcement. In fact, it is the very inverse of law enforcement. In law enforcement, a crime is discovered, and the police then look for a suspect who might possibly have committed it. Profiling means that a "suspect" is discovered, and the police then look for a crime that the person might have possibly committed. In the first case, a criminal act is committed and the police try to apprehend the criminal. In the second, the police commit an act of suspicion, and a person finds him/herself apprehended. That is, a person commits a crime in the first, while in the second, the police commit an act of criminalization. (LA,54) Profiling thus violates the tenets of law enforcement by making the police the active agent in the criminalization of a person. (This process would be impossible without the vast structure of "victimless crimes" that has been incorporated into the legal structure.) Law enforcement addresses people's acts in their particularity, and attempts to maintain order on a case by case basis, while profiling focuses on people themselves through a process of visual generalization, and disrupts social order and peace by introducing an atmosphere of aggressive harassment into it.

But generalizations of people never have their source in the people generalized, only in those doing the generalizing. A generalization cannot be empirical, because people always present themselves only as individuals. To see an individual as an example of a generalization means that one already has the generalization in mind in order to see the individual as exemplifying it. That is, one has already accepted the generalization, prior to the encounter. The act of generalization occurs in advance; that is, its social origin lies with those who generalize, rather than those it purports to be about. It is brought to individuals and imposed upon them from that social "elsewhere." And finally, all generalization contains a negative connotation because it assumes the social power to generalize others, to give them a negative valuation as generalizable.

It is precisely in this sense, as an already generalized visual procedure of noticing, that profiling assumes the appearance of being "reasonable," a valid way of doing things within a hierarchically racialized society, a society that prioritizes the noticing of race. Indeed, the structure of profiling is structurally analogous to racialization. Racialization begins as a generalization of individuals through some visual or conceptual aspect defined for them socially by others to be of notice, on which a negative valuation can be imposed, and which can then be used to attack or inferiorize those individuals in some fashion.

And like racialization, it produces a social division between those who are profiled and thereby criminalized, and those who are not -- a system of social categorizations invented and imposed by those who make the generalizations. To the extent that white crime is decriminalized because whites are not profiled, whiteness is given a different social as well as juridical meaning. Profiling thus conscripts crime in general into service as an instrument of social re-racialization. Thus, though judicially illegitimate, profiling appears socially natural.

Probable Cause

The legal concept that rationalizes police profiling and legitimates it is "probable cause." "Probable cause" is a rhetorical device that allows warrantless search or arrest by a police officer. It signifies that a cop has decided there is "cause to suspect a crime" is taking place, or has taken place. That a man "fits" the profile of a suspect being sought gives "probably cause" to stop and search the person. (LA,115) Should a man run away upon seeing the police, it provides probable cause for the police to think he is guilty of something, and therefore can be chased, shot, or stopped by other means, searched, beaten, and arrested. Rodney King's sin, for which he was tortured on a roadway in Los Angeles, was fleeing a traffic stop because he was afraid of what the police would do to him. "Probable cause" does not legitimize social aggression or brutality by the police, but it rhetorically provides the space for them.[2]

A profile provides the content for "probable cause," identifying in advance what aspects of appearance or behavior will warrant stopping a person. Anything that can be criminalized through profiling (in addition to race) -- for instance, clothing, hand codes, modes of socializing (hanging out), group dynamics, as well as hair style, age, and other elements of personal self-presentation within groups -- can then be used as probable cause. Many black social clubs, for instance, which provide a place of socializing off the street for black people, have been closed temporarily or permanently in US cities on this basis.

The conjunction of profiling and probable cause as routine procedures imply that the harassment and detaining of persons have become primary for the police over the maintenance of peace and security of social space. Social space gets divided into those areas disturbed by police actions, and those areas not. A hierarchy of social categorizations then emerges that reflects the various degrees of profiling to which people are subjected (young black motorists are "more" profiled than elderly black motorists, though both are profiled for traffic stops, while white middle class motorists are not profiled). The peace and security of "social space" becomes stratified hierarchically between those sectors whose peace is disturbed and those outside the profile who are left in peace. In effect, the actions of "peace officers" becomes, through the invocation of "probable cause," a disturbance of the peace of those they profile. In rhetorically addressing an alleged crime problem, the police become a crime problem.

It should be pointed out that this is not a sociological argument. Not every black motorist is stopped, nor are all white motorists treated with respect. What is being described here are the routine structures the police have available, and the social logic they reveal -- that is, the effect it has on people's social consciousness. Because racial profiling has become a social issue, most black people now think in terms of being stopped, whether they are or not, while most white people think of profiling as a sensible way of dealing with a "crime problem."

Ultimately, the ever-present potential for the disruption of social space becomes a low-intensity mode of social aggression by the state. The social stratification this aggression produces then signifies the varying degrees of personal liberty people are to be allowed. (LA,122) Individual liberty then becomes a political "commodity," a "public good" that can be transferred, taken from some and given to others, through shifts in the profiles. Some are allowed their freedom of behavior, and others are not because they as persons are criminalized before the fact.

Ultimately, under an ethos of profiling, the criminalization of behavior becomes a social norm. This extends institutionally, beyond police operations. When Mumia Abu-Jamal attempted to defend himself in a Pennsylvania courtroom, his conduct and behavior were used to rule him out of order, and to deprive him of this constitutional right. Judge Sabo claimed, during jury selection procedures, that Mumia's demeanor and his hair style (he wore dredlocks) scared one of the jurors. The constitution does not say a person must act a particular way to have access to guaranteed rights. But the judge ignored that in this instance (and such instances are legion), setting his personal standard of behavior above the non-negotiability of the highest law.[3]

The power of those in certain administrative positions to arbitrarily criminalize behavior reduces personhood to something that must fit a template in order to be given legal recognition or status in civil society, to not be rendered outside social legitimacy on sight. This constitutes a second dimension of social stratification through profiling. The institutional criminalization of behavior (in court or elsewhere) is not the prior condition for the legitimacy of profiling; the criminalization of behavior is itself a form of institutionalized profiling. They both reflect a common source. Relying on visual procedure and generalization, which they themselves then generalize, they both manifest the most fundamental operation of racism and its structures of racialization. They constitute two degrees of access to the law, two forms of legal status, two forms of being human for whites and people of color. Beyond constitutionality, both profiling and the criminalization of behavior become acceptible to American jurisprudence and to the social mainstream through that jurisprudence because they are well precedented in its historical structures of racialization, and are thus culturally familiar.

A third dimension of cultural familiarity, which attaches to profiling and probable cause, is the notion of guilt by association. The criminalization of teenagers in the name of street gang management, for instance, is based on it. In California, under current juvenile crime statutes, if one associates with others who belong to what the police have labelled (with neither a hearing nor accountability) a criminal street gang, one commits a crime. Clothing, gestures, hand codes, colors, etc. get listed as signs signifying gang status, and therefore guilt -- by association. Under such a statute, it is not what a person does, nor even who they are, but who or what they are associated with by others (the police) that comes under judicial control. Guilt by association criminalizes social connections, that is, it attributes criminality to an individual through his/her relations to others or to certain concepts. In effect, it extends profiling, which already constitutes a form of guilt by association in the sense that the police associate a particular appearance with a prior concept of what that appearance will mean before having been observed. The apriori guilt established by an act of association (and guilt by association is always apriori) may be unconstitutional because it deems an individual guilty until proven innocent, but in terms of police procedure, this has not been an obstacle.[4]

Like profiling, guilt by association is self-referential. In the case of street gang policing, it constitutes a unilateral police evaluation of individuals and social groups arbitrarily associated by the police to a description (of behavior or socializing, etc.) assumed criminal by the police themselves (in effect, extra-legally). This circularity has indeed been written into the law (in the California Juvenal Crime statute, for instance), insofar as it gives the police the responsibility to compile the data and generate the list of behaviors that will be considered criminal. Such a criminalization or derogation of behavior does not weigh the criminality of a specific action against a juridical standard of comportment; rather, it is the imposition upon a person of a prior evaluation of how a person or action already does not correspond with a prior standard of comportment, and is thus criminal. Guilt by association is the transformation of an extra-legal standard of comportment into a legal standard (without legislation) by the police. In effect, an individual is profiled because (behaviorally) deemed guilty by association with respect to the prior extra-legal standard that is brought to bear by an administrative (or police) agent, and guilty in advance because guilty by association with the profile. And this ethos extends socially (as culturally "familiar") to the mainstream paradigm that deems an individual placed under arrest as guilty in advance because placed under arrest, that is, guilty by association with judicial processing.

A Law Unto Themselves

What we have collated here are a number of juridical concepts that manifest themselves on the street in the person of the police as arbitrary and gratuitous procedure. Profiling, probable cause, and a generalized paradigm of guilt by association become the engine of police activity and aggressiveness toward certain racialized "target populations." Like generalization, they do not emerge from the individuals subjected to them; they are imposed on people from an institutional and political source that lies elsewhere. Because they generalize people, they not only parallel the structure of racialization, they continue it as an "ideology" that extends its aggression.

"Probable cause" signifies that, in any police situation, all the authority of the law can be brought to bear on a targetted individual through the person of the cop and the cop's self-involvement in that situation. Once detained, any police directive must be obeyed by the person detained. "Disobeying an officer" is a crime. In other words, once detained, any police directive translates into law. Refusal or resistance to a directive subjects a person to possible arrest, punishment (such as beating), or both. Thus, the police have the ability to create legal standards for street encounters through probable cause that then have the weight of actual law. That is, the police directive constitutes a cop's ability to make law in the moment. Having been profiled (criminalized), thus noticed (generalized), and stopped (absorbed into the judicial system), a person is confronted by another (the police), all of whose directives translate directly into law. The person detained is thus subjected to two systems of law, the legislated law and the law the police can make arbitrarily in the form of directives.

This gives the police the ability to transform a person under suspicion (already profiled) into a de facto criminal at will. The cop has but to find a directive that an individual will resist simply out of self-respect, a sense of dignity or justice, or a feeling that the directive is extreme and unwarranted. Such a stance will be construed as disobedience, and be cause for arrest, the use of painful restraints, torture with pepper spray, and charges of resisting arrest. If the officer choses to beat the person, the person can then be charged with assaulting the officer since the judicial presumption is that an officer will use violence to make an arrest only in self-defense. The cop's use of violence becomes presumed evidence that the cop was threatened or assaulted.

Thus an individual not only becomes captive to the legal system through the cop's noticing and profiling but, in being constrained to absolute obedience, can be criminalized and subjected to arrest in fact for defense of his/her dignity, self-respect, or sense of justice. Defense of one's humanity or self-respect can also be construed as an actual assault on the law if the officer decides to assault that self-respect violently. This goes beyond the mere criminalization of behavior that it relies on; it constitutes the ability to criminalize a person's personhood and sense of justice itself.

Thus, profiling and its attendant aggressiveness imply that the police have arrogated to themselves the power to determine who will be human, whose self-respect will be respected, whose autonomy and independence will go unpunished, and whose not. While the overt nature of this self-arrogation of power is a demand for obedience, its overall political import is a demand for obeisence. Obeisence differs from obedience in the same way profiling differs from law enforcement. In obedience, one stands as a person in relation to that which one obeys; in obeisence, one abandons one's standing as a person to the transcendent meaning of an icon or concept to which one must abject oneself. In disobedience, one only criminalizes oneself; non-obeisence becomes a criminalized status imposed gratuitously by the institution that demands obeisence.

This returns us to the question of impunity. "Impunity" is not simply a result of police departments offering internal solidarity to those officers who act with brutality or criminalize people. It names the hyper-political context in which the police not only stands above both police regulations and legal prohibitions against torture or murder, but become a law unto themselves, to which they can demand obeisence. It names the power given the police, authorized through the concept of "probable cause," to brutalize or dehumanize a person at will, without accountability. This means that the person subjected to that power has no recourse, neither in the moment nor through judicial procedure. A demand for recourse in the moment (for instance, an explanation or discussion of the situation) will be construed as criminal resistance and punished;[5] an insistence on due process after the fact will crash against the presumptions of the profile and probable cause. In other words, impunity is a system that extends both the juridical structure and the internal solidarity of police departments beyond that entire system simply standing up for its members' "excesses" out of organizational esprit de corps. A police department is duty-bound, prior to considerations of "solidarity," to affirm the impunity of each officer because "impunity" becomes the form "upholding the law" takes under the paradigm of profiling; and "upholding the law" is their sworn function. Because criminalization occurs in advance, both police accountability and judicial recourse by its victim are foreclosed by this sense of "duty." Not only can each officer make law in the moment to suit himself, but the police as a whole become a law unto themselves.

Once impunity becomes routine, as it has, the law itself ceases. Insofar as the law is, by definition, that to which all people are responsible, the ability of the police to make law in the moment without accountability means that the police are no longer held under the law, are no longer responsible to the law. Their responsibility to civil society is actually abrogated by the ability to make law in the moment, and by their ability to substitute violence for responsibility. To become the law means to dispense with the law. Because police directives are given the weight of law, the law becomes null. And this again articulates the final inversion of policing implicit in profiling and impunity: once the police can criminalize a section of society, the police themselves become a crime problem.

Instead of being addressed as a crime problem, police impunity becomes a socio-political function that deploys crime to re-stratify and reracialize society (because the means of criminalizing are visual). As in all racialization, it reflects a cultural ethos that presumes to determine who will be human and who will not, based on who is noticeable and who is left unnoticed, who will be criminalized in advance, and whose actual crime will be decriminalized.

To recapitulate, police profiling constitutes a structure of racialization. As generalizing, it reflects within contemporary juridical space the mode by which racism constructs groups as races through its generalizations. Profiling categorizes groups to be noticed and differentiated, based on prior racialization, using an assumed and generalized criminalization for the purpose. When police profiling singles out black and brown people, it is not the individual's behavior that renders them suspect; instead, the prior criminalization of color becomes the proxy for behavior, and renders their behavior suspect in advance. As criminalizing, profiling denigrates and inferiorizes those it criminalizes, because a reduction in juridical status is produced by it generalizations. The generalizations of behavior become a euphemism for racialization. Thus, the criminalization of race gets inverted as the racialization of crime. Black behavior, whether illegal or not, gets deemed criminal, while white racist violence, whether prosecuted or not, becomes simply behavior. Generalization, racialization, and criminalization are interwoven and inseparable moments in an endless re-construction of whiteness and white supremacy.

Herein lies the key to the idea of race itself. It has nothing to do with genetics; genetics is merely conscripted opportunistically as an accomplice. Race is a form of social categorization. It is based on a dominant group noticing a visible characteristic to which a prior negative valuation has been given, and through which the dominant group superiorizes itself by inferiorizing those it notices. While it grounds itself in generalizations of the other, that generalization is invented for the purposes of racialization, and is thus both gratuitous and arbitrary. Violence is inherent in this process since the identity of the dominant group is dependent upon the inferiorization of the subjugated group, requiring that inferiorization to be continually renewed in order for self-identification of the dominant group to retain its value. And inferiorization always requires violence. Violence is not only the essence of racism, but of white identity itself in the US.

In effect, subjugated people reside at the core of the dominant identity, yet must be continually evicted from it in order for that identity to preserve itself. Exclusion as a form of inclusion, separation as a form of identification, violence as a form of social stasis, the gratuitous as a form of necessity, are what characterize the foundations of race, and reveal race to be a system of social relations rather than an inherent character of people.

And this suggests in part the motivation for racial profiling in the US today. In the wake of the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, a direct return to an historical concept of racism, operating within a traditional structure of segregation, was no longer possible. Instead, racial profiling is a re-racialization process whose aim is to reconstitute white consensus and white supremacy in response to the transformations wrought by the civil rights struggles. In the late 19th century, after the Civil War and emancipation, this was accomplished by segregation and disenfranchisement statutes that reconstructed white society. It is simply that the ideological component of the contemporary mode is different. And it uses different strategies.

Among the central strategies or rhetorical modes of promoting impunity are "zero tolerance" and "Quality of Life" (QOL) enforcement. A city will seek to sweep away people and behaviors that government has decided offend or corrode society's everyday appearance. For instance, QOL is used as a rationale to harass and arrest homeless people who panhandle, to clear them out of consumerist or tourist areas as a blight on the urban landscape. It is thus a class based ideology since, while harassing the homeless, it valorizes the landlords who rendered people homeless by increasing rent beyond affordability. In attacking those already subjected to society's abrogations, the destitute and the discriminated, it is politically repressive. "Quality of life" enforcement becomes another way a government abandons responsibility for its citizens, and disguises it has law enforcement. It also involves assaults on the social or political activists who may attempt to win some justice or offer an alternative to this derogation. Organizations like "Food Not Bombs," "ACT-UP," street gangs, and black social clubs all manifest such alternatives, and all fall into this category.

The theory behind zero-tolerance and "quality of life" strategies is that if the police crack down hard on minor crimes and offenses, then major violent crime will be eliminated at the same time. (LA,71) Thus, massive force becomes standard, even against petty offenses, including credit card fraud or cult activity; and brutality becomes routine. Non-obesience to police directives renders one a minor offender, and one is then dealt with as a major criminal. And Parenti points out that this has become a nationally coordinated strategy. (LA,70)

But there is also a "theory of society" manifest by these strategies, for which police impunity becomes the methodology. Zero tolerance strategies proclaim certain elements of society to be an enemy, which must be reduced to submission. Though this enemy is elusive, hidden in the folds of the social fabric, its signifier, "major violent crime," becomes the watchword of a campaign against it, engaged through low-intensity skirmishes. The police set themselves militarily against this enemy, which they recognize through profiles. And they enact it through the deployment of lethal weaponry as a first response, rather than as back-up. (LA,135) When someone identified by a profile is shot, the cop who did it is exonerated in advance as a combatant in this low-intensity war. For the police, to shoot or strangle a person who struggles against restraint (for instance, Aaron Williams), or who simply walks away from a police interrogation, to win a small victory in this war. They claim they have defeated an enemy in the name of a law which the enemy had apriori violated through having been proclaimed (however tacitly) an "enemy" in the first place through the profile that noticed him/her.

In effect, the major crime the police focus on is the crime of being noticed by the police; those noticed become the enemy to be engaged as such because the police have noticed them. Concomitant to the government's abrogation of responsibility to its citizens, QOL enforcing marks a self-defining and self-referential campaign to divide society into the acceptible and the unacceptible.

Under "zero tolerance," the police operate as an army of occupation, a presence that produces the aura of martial law and renders social space occupied territory in pursuit of its system of noticing. The specificity of civilian law is surpassed and left behind in the absolutized relation of the police to the person on the street or in his/her home. In sum, the militarization of the police lies not in its use of military weapons, high-tech communication, or state-sanctioned torture techniques (beatings, pepper spray, pain-inflicting restraints, etc.), but its pro-active aggressiveness, coupled with its ability to construct whatever law and legality it may need in the moment in order to criminalize those it has engaged as the "enemy."

But to this extent, though the police have militarized themselves as an army of occupation, they also operate a other than military. As Parenti points out, there is no unified military organization; their command structure is highly decentered -- among cities, precincts and districts, and finally, the autonomy of the individual police officer. Even through national coordination under the LEAA, (LA,75) police operations are not performed pursuant to pre-defined governmental ends, as are military campaigns. The significance of this is that the police constitute a paramilitary rather than a military force. Paramilitary forces have capabilities denied both governments and legitimate armed forces, among which are an autonomy of operation, and an ability to violate human rights and terrorize people without accountability. The paramilitary forces operating in Latin America, ostensibly independent of civilian government, provide civilian government with an alibi while repressing popular movements. Government can issue denials, complain of powerlessness against the unlawful activity, and express concern for human rights and democracy. Yet they become dependent on those forces for social control. Thus, paramilitary forces become powerful influences on the politics of a nation, without becoming an open political participant. It is the ability of an officer to create a criminalizing situation for any individual in the moment that is the function of this decentralization, and renders the police paramilitary.

Ultimately, with respect to the complex connection between paramilitary criminalization processes and the structure of racialization, the term "racism" has become an empoverished term. While it still pertains to a social context of violence, it makes reference to race rather than racialization, to a biologism rather than the social relation it signifies; that is, to something about the victim of the structure rather than to the structure that victimizes. Thus, it falls short. It hides the fact that profiling and impunity (whether by the police or any other social institution) function as one mode by which white people obtain status (whiteness) and a sense of being normative (human). Though most white people would object to this idea, they remain unable to see its dynamic precisely because it is successful -- that is, precisely because they consider themselves white, and therefore human. It is the normativity of others being noticed as non-white, which constitutes their very consciousness of being white, that prevents whites from noticing that the police operate by noticing non-whites. Indeed, the simple assumption by whites that non-white people are human in the same way they are prevents whites from noticing that their own sense of being human already constitutes a social categorization that differentiates them, and that the term "human" takes on different meanings on either side of the divide created by profiling.

Historical precedence

The antecedent to all this is, of course, slave law. As Saidiya Hartman has argued, slave law was based on two contradictory principles, the necessity of the slave master to have absolute obedience from the slave, and the voluntary accession to the master on the part of the slave.[6] This duality emerged from the double existence of the slave as legally designated "property" who was still a person.[7] For these two forms of existence to be realized, this ideology required two systems of law, one which held for white society, and the law of the "master" to exact absolute submission from the slave.

During the half-century before the Civil War, many contorted court cases established that public law must sanction in advance whatever the "master" had to do to bring about obedience. (SOS,91-2) The courts in general decided that the absolute submission of the slave was essential not only for the maintenance of the slave system, but for the general (white) public welfare as well. It was the greatest "public good" that required that each master insure the total submission of the slave as a "principle of moral right." In one exemplary case, a white man shot a slave he had hired from another owner to stop her from fleeing a beating he was about to administer for a small infraction; the court found him responsible for damages to the "owner," but not guilty of assault since his power to exact obedience, if it were to be absolute, was "not a subject for discussion." (SOS,91) If the degree of control was to be absolute, then anything could be considered a minor infraction, (SOS,62-3) and whatever violent or brutal means of punishment necessary were legitimated in advance. (SOS,92) Their sexual conduct toward slaves, the inflicting of pain, the invention of forms of obedience, were "private" matters of ownership which the courts agreed were beyond the purview of the law. (SOS,96) For the submission of the slave, the owner's word was law, a law unto itself. (SOS,83)

Slave law thus established two different social realms, the public and the private, each operating according to its own law. The private domain of the landowner stood beyond public law, and that standing beyond was seen as a social "responsibility" toward public society; this produced a realm of impunity over which the public law abjured jurisdiction, and thus sanctioned.

Ironically, in "slave code" jurisprudence, the valorization of absolute obedience was to be "balanced" in the public law by the establishment of legal safeguards for the slave against public abuse, assault, etc. -- just as police impunity is still understood to be "balanced" by the Bill of Rights. However, the "laws" that pretended to safeguard the slave's person were worthless in court since slaves could not testify against whites. The safeguards were left to a "mutuality" of "affection" between the master and the slave. (SOS,91) The law actually recognized that the slave's major recourse was to the "good feelings" of the master, the relation of "affection" between the two as people "born and bred together," contingent upon the prior relation of "perfect submission as an ordering principle of the social."

And similarly, under the operation of police impunity, the constitutionally guaranteed rights against unreasonable searches and seizure of person or property now function under the aegis of impunity, which likewise demands "submission as an ordering principle of the social." Due process and civil rights for profiled arrests, asset forfeiture, or house searches are postponed, and derogated if real criminality (resistance) can be shown. This only becomes a motivation for police violence, since police violence is presumed to signify self-defense against a threat, and prima facia evidence of real criminality on the part of the suspect. Thus, the criminality imposed by the police through charges of resisting arrest, disobeying an officer, etc. obviate the guarantee of due process even in its postponement.

Hartman describes masters revelling in a willfulness of punishment, an enjoyment in whipping, beating, or mutilating slaves guilty of minor infractions, as an element of "enjoying" their "property right." Indeed, under the aegis of absolute submission, the "master" felt entitled to enjoy not only obedience from the slave, but an enactment by the slave of a performance of pleasure or contentment at service, even in the face of whatever violation of the slave's personhood (rape or torture) the "master" thought appropriate. In Hartman's account, the landowner's "enjoyment" of his/her property was to be literally staged, so that it referred not only to having property, but to being entertained by it. Behavior evincing disgruntlement, discontent, recalcitrance, or resistance was non-submission, and thus punishable. (SOS,94) Labor, sexual service, and friendly performance were all dimensions of the same relation.[8] The slave that showed any autonomy was considered one who had taken over control of someone else's property, and thus was guilty of a form of theft, or expropriation, and punished as such. (SOS,66) Similarly, for those profiled to claim Constitutional rights in the face of police impunity are thus guilty of pretending to a superseding law which impunity has itself already superseded. Not to show the required obeisence means one's existence has become a transgression, no longer available to civil rights.

The effect of the slave codes was not only to create a situation in which a black person was thrown from one form of non-identity to another, but white society insured its own identity in its ability to have it both ways. When a white man injured a slave of another white man, the first was liable for damage to property; that is, the person of the slave was only protected as the property of another. If a slave stole something, the slave was punished by a master whose "property" s/he was; that is, the slave was punished as property by first being granted the character of human personhood to which the juridical category of theft was relevant. Thus, the public face of the slave as a person was defined in terms of the slave as property, and the private face of the slave as property was defined in terms of the slave as person. Profiling continues this duality. When the police stop a suspect through profiling, they are stopping a non-person because they have generalized the person in advance; but they must bestow on that suspect the character of a person in order to discover something criminal for him/her to have committed as an individual. At the same time, to invent a charge against the person, the police must reduce the other to the status of object from which absolute obedience is to be exacted.

In reflecting the earlier "tradition," police impunity's demand for submission and obeisence also reconstructs the separation of social authority into two realms, the public and the private. The police constitute the "private" domain insofar as they can make law for themselves in the moment, and criminalize deviance from absolute submission. Their hold over the person stopped is as absolute as that of the slave master, and the demand for obedience as unconditional. Thus, the private realm of the slave relation gets mapped onto police violence and the public realm gets mapped onto white society, onto that sector of society that remains unprofiled and unaffected by it. Impunity is authorized not by being public, but by being that "private" domain of law which reconstitutes the public realm itself.

Though the task, or charge, to produce absolute submission in a sector of the population, including the ability to shoot a person and go unpunished, is something the police have given to themselves, it is valorized by the surrounding political culture because it is wholly familiar. Both the police and the impunity of slave masters belong to the same paradigm of dual systems of law, sanctioned by the law, in producing the subjection of people of color. What contemporary juridical procedure has done, by valorizing police impunity, is regenerate the doubled system of law of the slave system. There is one law for the unprofiled, and that is the law legislated and written in law books. That is, there is the reservation of private space within the public domain in which a law of impunity becomes absolute. Thus, both manifest the component elements of white racialized identity: paranoia ("the" crime problem), violence (police impunity), and white solidarity (public sanction of "private" law).

Impunity in Political Terms

Three political corollaries emerge from this discussion. The first, which follows from the fact that profiling remains unseen by those unprofiled, involves the recurrence of police violence as a social spectacle, the overtness of violence, as in the suppression of the Million Youth March in Harlem, or the breakup of the Dorismund funeral in Brooklyn. The second, which follows from the police as a private domain, is an implicit structural impossibility of a functional civilian review board. And the third is the exigent production of the prison industrial complex.

As suggested above, the notion of "fighting crime" has become a euphemism for paramilitary operations which arrogate to themselves the power to define who will be socially acceptible and who will not, who will be human and who will not. Sanctioned in advance by public law and mainstream political culture, the effect of these operations is to divide society into two domains, the racialized and the unracialized. A privilege accrues in the ability to be unprofiled, that is, to be non-black or non-brown; it is a privilege that public society seeks not to have to recognize as such, but to be considered and known as a natural state of affairs. One of the critical aspects of profiling, of the act of noticing, however, is that it is ignorable by those outside the profile. If it remains unknown as a social operation, then it fails to produce an awareness of the social division as "natural." Because profiling itself is visual (and hence racializing), it remains invisible to most of white America, who escape notice. One doesn't notice that one is not noticed by the police; one simply thinks they are doing the job of resolving a crime problem.

While this insouciance constitutes legitimation, it requires a greater concrete awareness of itself to become a sense of social order, a recognition of social categorization. The division of society becomes meaningful only if its beneficiaries and recipients are able to confirm its existence. The solidarity and security of white society depends on understanding what there is with which to be in solidarity. For this purpose, the threat the police are dealing with must be made "real." The quiet and arbitrary sweep of hundreds of thousands of minor offenders of victimless crime laws into prison would have no cultural effect. Something visible, a spectacle, must be added in order to complete its social function.

As Ida Wells pointed out in the 1890s, it was the public spectacle of lynching that produced the feeling among whites that black men were out to rape white women, that Jim Crow laws were thus necessary, and that the law had to be supplemented by extra-legal means to stem the tide. In the same vein, it is precisely the publicity around the deadly operations of the paramilitary police which signify that the profiled are indeed criminal, against whom paramilitarization is necessary. Public ritualistic murder and brutality give the mainstream an opportunity to notice police strategies, to hear the rhetoric of juridical authorization, and to recognize the lines that violence functions to draw across the social fabric by which whiteness is reaffirmed.

Thus, police murders are not incidental, nor are they the work of "rogue" cops. They are an essential part of the larger campaign of social re-racialization. The day after the acquittal of Diallo's killers, the next murder of a black man occurred, a few blocks away. Malcolm Ferguson, a man who had been active in rallying community support for the police indictments, and opposition to police impunity, was shot to death during a traffic stop. A few weeks later, a man named Patrick Dorismund was killed by an undercover cop because he refused the cop's demand for a drug trade. At his funeral, which involved a march of several thousand people, many were hospitalized by the police when they charged into the assembly of mourners. It is these actions that sanctify police violence, and enable their general campaigns of profiling to constitute a recategorization of social strata.

Of course, in reconstructing whiteness for whites, and demanding support for their war on "violent crime," they are also "enforcing" a white solidarity, as well as constructing it, as the cost of that construction. It constitutes an additional aspect of social control. Whites are brought under control as white through the unquestionability of what the police are doing. The solidarity demanded of them means that whites cannot protest against injustice, whether toward themselves as exploited, or against others as profiled, without additional peril, that of calling in question their membership in white society, that is, their solidarity with whiteness. Police violence, however gratuitous, becomes the act of solidifying white solidarity. While the ethos of law and order, the sanctity of police impunity, has becomes the shape of the membership card that white people carry to signify their whiteness, it is also their draft card into that society (irresponsibility toward which is punishable).

The second corollary, the impossibility of a civilian review board to oversee police procedure, follows directly from the first. Police profiling represents a division in the law between public and private domains, each of which participates in producing the other. The police, by producing a social stratification, reconstruct public (white) society within which public law functions to sanction (in a de facto sense) the impunity of the police as a private domain. The structural connection between the police and those who seek legal (public) recourse against their abuse by the police has been broken. People can only go to the public law for recourse, while public law has already granted and sanctioned police autonomy as a private domain outside itself. Thus, the people profiled are divested of any political connection to that which besets them.

For the police, all review boards stand in contradiction to their autonomy. If the police oppose community self-defense against crime, it is because it would imply a community ethic of defense against all violence, including that of the police. It would call in question the police domain (private law) of impunity. Oversight would curtail the spectacles whereby they produce awareness of their stratifying social function. Mass struggles to win civilian review have been exercises in futility, as have attempts at community control of policing or community self-policing. The police acceed to community policing only if it is under the control of the police, with all operations routed through the police department first (a bureaucratization rather than a democratization).[9] Though a few review boards have been empanelled in different cities, they have simply had the ability to make "recommendations," and never with enforcement power. In other words, every attempt to win civilian review of as well as over police operations has failed, not only because of police opposition but because the public law has already sanctioned that failure. For public law, the police need not reliquish control over their operations manuals, nor open them to public scrutiny, nor allow their standards to be reviewed by the community. In a word, they need never submit themselves to democratic governance. Their standards of comportment, like their juridicality, remain beyond the law, a private domain.

The other side of this coin, which has grown naturally out of the structure of impunity, and concretizes the crisis that the reconstructed boundary between the public and the private represents, is the prison-industrial complex (PIC). The central function of prison in the US has not been "corrections," nor the curtailing of violent crime (which prison has never done); its central purpose, whether in the form of the slave plantation, the chain gangs of the Jim Crow era, or the contemporary PIC, has instead been the conscriptive control of black personhood and black labor. New prisons are now being built and filled not because there is a growing crime problem, nor because prisons have ever solved one, but because the dual structure of law that paramilitary police represent require prisons as containers for the victims of impunity, as adjuncts to the racializing structure and domain of that impunity.[10]

Today, the prisons do not function as punishment for crime; they are the place where punishment for having been criminalized occurs, the place where public law ratifies the private domain it has established beyond itself. The prison system does not begin with the door in the back of the court through which the convicted disappear after solemn pronunciations from the bench. It begins on the street, at the point where police impunity effects itself as its own law. That is the lip of the funnel that today pours thousands into faraway jail cells; the courts with their judicial procedures are only an intermediate passageway. Judges, prosecutors, and jailors have all become conveyors in that structure, the intermediary machinery that absorbs into, and at the same time excludes from, the public domain, by imprisoning, as part of its affirmation of police impunity. In filling the prisons with those swept up by police aggressiveness, the judicial machinery bestows validity and legitimacy on it. The PIC is the materialization of that legitimacy. The farming out of prison labor to corporate benefit, and the privatization of prisons, are simply continuations of this more fundamental social division.

This structure is not new, nor is it only a distant echo of the plantation slave system, whose form of directly imprisoned labor was itself impunity as such. It stretches continually through that intermediate century from the 1860s to the 1960s known as the Jim Crow era, whose legalized modes of segregation and disenfranchisement were but the political expression of a different channel from impunity to criminalization to prison. Though the topic of that interregnum between the double legal system of slavery and that of today is vast, and will require much research and investigation, suffice it to say that it forms an unbroken connection between the two.

From the Civil War to the Second World War, reaching a peak around the turn of the century, many forms of debt servitude and usurious crop mortgaging systems were devised to chain black tenant farmers and sharecroppers to debt, to the land, to labor, and to permanent empoverishment through that debt. Some of these forms are outlined in the chapters on the "black belt" in W.E.B. DuBois's book, The Souls of Black Folk. Commercial and proprietary hold over black land-workers was enacted through contract law and by ignoring ordinary (public) social protections concerning juridical procedures, interest rates, evictions, social comportment, self-defense, vagrancy, etc. when it concerned black farm tenants and laborers. And paramilitary terror was held at the ready against all attempts at agrarian labor or tenant organizing. In effect, those who used debt and landholding to hold juridically free people in thrall had its own form of impunity, sanctioned by public law as well as separated from it. And should the debtors fall too far behind, or flee to escape the deathly condition of their empoverishment, they were subject to arrest, to be funneled through a court system that travelled them quickly to prison workhouses and chaingangs used to maintain the material infrastructure of the south. Thus, the landed and commerical interests of the post-Civil War period had their own forms of impunity to generate their own forms of absolute submission of black land-workers to and in their servitude. And as a private domain of debt exploitation, while insisting on its autonomy, it relied on the public legal machinery for valorization, as well as to sweep up those who did not submit.

In short, the crux of the Jim Crow system was not the chaingang, nor segregation, but the impunity of a system of debt servitude, the private power to chain a people to land, labor, and empoverishment that segregation and the chaingang, as public law, serviced and valorized. And today, the crux of the prison industry does not lie in the prison itself, but in the system of valorization of police impunity by the political culture that both bestows that impunity and builds the prisons. In other words, the political question the massive rate of imprisonment raises is not simply how to end or correct it, but how to transform policing, beyond its training procedures and manuals, its operational ethics and standards. To end its impunity, the deeper structure that continually reproduces that impunity in different forms, but with the same content, must be recognized -- a structure that has operated throughout US history.

To discern the forms of double legal structure, constituted as a separation of public and private domains, is only to situate them as the essential signifiers for the structures of racialization they continually express. Today, the police have been substituted in urban areas for the "private" domain of the plantation "masters," or of the rural banks and dry goods establishments of the Jim Crow south, to insure the submission of labor of color to white society as a whole. In that sense, plantation, debt servitude, land tenancy, ghetto, police precinct, paramilitary armored corps, and the prison-industrial complex all flow into each other, as the many heads of the hydra by which whiteness and white supremacy have maintained themselves as the central social structures of the US.



Notes

1. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999), p. 54. Hereafter cited as LA.

2. The first appearance of the expression "probable cause" in US jurisprudence occurs in the U.S. Constitution. The fourth amendment states:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, suppoted by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

"Probable cause" has to do specifically with searches and seizures. As we shall see, in US case law, particularly the slaves codes and the Dred Scott decision, the term "people" refers to whites. The term "unreasonable" has been limited; issues of national security, and profiles, makes searches "reasonable." And the police have been given the force of warrant by profiling, to which "fitting the profile" they then bear witness. That is, it is to become witness to their own prior perception and decision. In effect, the intended protections of the amendment have been pretty well gutted.

3. The psychiatric industry is based on the same hyper-constitutional principle; if one's behavior strays sufficiently from an unlegislated "norm," then one can be deprived of one's freedom without due process, by means of an ostensible medical decision. Cf. Thomas Szasz, "Ideology and Insanity".

4. The most contorted form of guilt by association, in which guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven, is in asset forfeiture. Asset forfeiture attributes behavior to things themselves, in order to circumvent Constitutionality. Though the 5th amendment establishes that property can not be seized without due process, assets can be seized arbitrarily if the police decide that such assets can be used in the commission of a crime, thus establishing that the person associated with the assets might be a criminal. Asset forfeiture is not seen as a seizure of someone's property, but a preventive detention (of assets) to obviate facilitating a crime. The forfeiture treats the assets as themselves suspect, and apprehensible (detainable) as such, while the person associated with the assets then becomes guilty by association with them. The assets are guilty by association with the suspect, and the person is suspect by association with the assets.

5. When the police broke up the Dorismund funeral in Brooklyn and made mass arrests, none of which were valid charges in court, they were autonomously punishing political expression and social autonomy. When 19 year old Jerrold Hall walked away from a BART cop in Hayward, California, November 1992, because what the cop had asked him was senseless, the cop shot him in the back and killed him, and received no reprimand. That people have been shot because a cop has been called to a "domestic quarrel" is evidence that discussion of one's situation with the police has long since ceased to be a possibility.

6. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997). Hereafter cited as SOS.

7. The notion that people can be property is of course fraudulent, a form of self-deception, and stupid. If people could be property in the sense of an object or land, then the title deed itself would be sufficient to establish compliance and obedience to the "owner." But it never has been, to supplement which vast technologies of punishment and patroling have been necessary. A person can be captured, held captive, and tortured until they work, but to euphemize this as "ownership" is only to disguise its criminality for oneself. The salient fact that must be confronted is that an entire society founded itself on this criminal self-deception, and transformed it into a sense of honor and patriotism for itself.

8. An entire theory of the "power of submission" was developed by pro-slavery sociologists, such as George Fitzhugh. Proclaiming that weakness could exercise power over strength through seduction, this theory reasoned that slaves would act content in order to get what they needed from the master. Seduction was a mode of empowerment. And thus, the degree to which a slave submitted to the master was the degree to which they were equal in power. In particular, with respect to sexual relations, since rape was not a possibility with respect to slave women because resistance was prohibited, sexual relations were to be considered desired and seduced on the part of the slave women raped. (SOS,86) Rape, torture, injury, and terror, were not definable categories under such a system. Yet even to disguise one's violation of the slave's integrity and autonomy, a humanity had to be bestowed upon the slave in order to take it away again, and then further disguised as a seduction of the master to that violation to which the slave submitted "gladly."

9. Perhaps the largest contemporary experiment in community policing (though it was always promoted as much more than that) was the Oslo Peace Agreement between Palestinians and Israel establishing the Palestine Authority (PA). The PA was given the task of policing the Palestinian communities, meaning curtail their resistance to Israeli settlement and occupation of Palestinian areas, which the Israeli government was finding difficult. The task given the PA was to render the Palestinian people docile and acquiescent. The PA's inability to do that as well then became Israel's rationale to further aggression against Palestinian areas.

Based upon the Palestinian precedent, we can see what would happen in the US, should community policing be established. The community police would have to agree to enforce black or brown compliance to the laws and functioning of the US as a society -- viz. what the police do now -- laws and functions that are white supremacist. For a black community or neighborhood, a black community police, while it might not be as violent to neighborhood people as white police are, would nevertheless be charged with suppressing resistance to white supremacy, to which it was responsible. If it could not do so, then the surrounding white political structure would invade and reoccupy the territory -- violently because their "agreement" had been broken. Either community policing would assume the tasks of the white police, or an overt militarization of the community would occur, making the situation worse.

10. The "Dirty Harry" concept had already made the point that impunity and social recategorization would be real only if impunity could present itself as a serious threat. While the movies of "Dirty Harry" concentrated on the police in their alleged "paramilitary" struggle against social evil, the real target of the movies was a judiciary that insisted on granting the accused their constitutional rights. The movies were instrumental in shifting the onus of arrest from accusation to guilt, and the judicial granting of rights to the accused to be seen as granting rights to criminals, assumed to be criminal before conviction simply for having been arrested. Thus, granting rights to the accused came to be seen as absurd, a self-defeating endeavor; in effect, the granting of rights to the accused constituted the defeat of police impunity. And this paradigm became instrumental in establishing the courts as the legal gullet that opened between the world and the prisons, into which increasing numbers of people were thrown.
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Militarization of the Police - Steve Martinot

Postby RobinDaHood » Mon Mar 26, 2012 6:28 pm

Watch reruns of Cops.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COPS_%28TV_series%29
The first segment is usually an action segment to hook the viewer, followed by a slower, or more "lyrical" segment, and concluding with a more "thoughtful" segment. This has been the formula and visual style of COPS as the first network reality TV series and has remained so from episode one until the present day. Other innovations for its time included Langley's insistence that as few edits as possible be used, that all cameramen throw away their tripods and shoot exclusively handheld, and that natural audio be the score of the series.

That show has perfectly documented the rise of the authoritarian state and the (de)evolved role of police and the business of policing in the US in general. The true beauty of the show is it's reinforcement and glamorization of all the negative aspects of the article above.
The show has been criticized for its predominant focus on the criminal activities among the poor. Critics of this aspect of the show say it unfairly presents the poor as responsible for most crime in society while ignoring the "white-collar crimes" that are typical of the more wealthy. Controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore raises this tenet in an interview with a former associate producer of COPS, Richard Herlan, in Moore's film Bowling for Columbine.

His response to Moore was that television is primarily a visual medium, requiring regular footage on a weekly basis to sustain a show, and police officers "busting in" on an office where identity theft papers are being created or other high-level crime rings are operating does not happen very often. It is therefore not likely to be recorded and thus not shown. The low-level crime featured on the show happens every day, providing large quantities of material suitable for taping.

The show can really be a trip when episodes from different seasons are presented intermingled. :rofl2
User avatar
RobinDaHood
 
Posts: 126
Joined: Tue Jul 26, 2011 11:35 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Martial Law / Police State News

Postby elfismiles » Tue May 01, 2012 11:55 am


Fully Armed U.S. Troops Patrol Minnesota Neighborhood

Guard members previously hunted insurgents in Iraq

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com

ImageTuesday, May 1, 2012A photo showing fully armed U.S. National Guard troops patrolling a quiet residential street in Crookston, Minnesota has gone viral, once again underscoring concerns that Americans are being conditioned to accept the gradual imposition of martial law.

Although the photo is undated, Guard troops from the local Crookston Armory routinely take part in off-base exercises which train the local population to accept the sight of armed soldiers patrolling their neighborhoods as normal.

One such exercise in February 2011 dubbed "Urban Operations Training" involved military Humvees and 27 armed soldiers conducting a drill around the Bridge Street area of Crookston.

According to “Maggie,” the woman who took the photograph, when she started taking pictures of the troops one of them told her, "Just training Ma'am. Joining up with another patrol at the rally point."

When Maggie asked why they were training on the streets of a quiet residential area, a younger soldier responded, "To be honest ma'am, I don't know." Members of the same Guard unit shown on the photograph – Minnesota National Guard, Unit 2-136 CAB / B Company – have been deployed to Iraq where their duties would potentially have included rounding up alleged insurgents and taking them to prison camps, a frightening prospect given that the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act allows for American citizens to be similarly kidnapped and detained without trial.National Guard troops are routinely involved in ‘urban warfare training’ drills but they usually take place within the confines of military bases.

Many fear that the increasing presence of armed soldiers patrolling residential neighborhoods is a precursor to martial law.Indeed, back in 2008 theWashington Post reported how 20,000 U.S. troops returning from Iraq would be stationed inside America under Northcom for purposes of "domestic security" from September 2011 onwards.

Northcom officials were forced to subsequently issue a denial after the Army Times initially reported that the troops would be used to deal "with civil unrest and crowd control.”

The use of U.S. troops in law enforcement duties is a complete violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act, which substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement unless under precise and extreme circumstances.

Section 1385 of the Posse Comitatus Act states, "Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both." As Alex Jones exposed back in the late 1990's, U.S. troops have been training to impose martial law for a considerable amount of time. During numerous urban warfare drills that Jones attended and reported on, troops were trained to raid, arrest and imprison U.S. citizens in detention camps as well as taking over public buildings and running checkpoints. During role playing exercises, actors playing prisoners would scream "I'm an American citizen, I have rights" as they were being dragged away by troops. The fact that such drills are now set to involve Russian soldiers training on U.S. soil to hunt “terrorists” has also caused consternation.Federal authorities in the United States have clearly been preparing for domestic civil unrest for a number of years. The Department of Homeland Security recently purchased a staggering 450 million rounds of hollow point bullets as well as bullet-proof checkpoint booths that include "stop and go" lights.

The images below show U.S. troops and National Guard working with local police to incarcerate Americans into internment camps during drills Alex Jones covered in 1999 in Oakland, California.

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

http://www.infowars.com/fully-armed-u-s ... ghborhood/

User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)

Re: The Militarization of the Police - Steve Martinot

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Wed Mar 06, 2013 3:43 pm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/0 ... f=politics

ACLU Launches Nationwide Police Militarization Investigation

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has launched a nationwide campaign to assess police militarization in the United States. Starting Wednesday, ACLU affiliates in 23 states are sending open records requests to hundreds of state and local police agencies requesting information about their SWAT teams, such as how often and for what reasons they're deployed, what types of weapons they use, how often citizens are injured during SWAT raids, and how they're funded. More affiliates may join the effort in the coming weeks.

Additionally, the affiliates will ask for information about drones, GPS tracking devices, how much military equipment the police agencies have obtained through programs run through the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, and how often and for what purpose state National Guards are participating in enforcement of drug laws.

"We've known for a while now that American neighborhoods are increasingly being policed by cops armed with the weapons and tactics of war," said Kara Dansky, senior counsel at the ACLU's Center for Justice, which is coordinating the investigation. "The aim of this investigation is to find out just how pervasive this is, and to what extent federal funding is incentivizing this trend."

The militarization of America's police forces has been going on for about a generation now. Former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates first conceived the idea of the SWAT team in the late 1960s, in response to the Watts riots and a few mass shooting incidents for which he thought the police were unprepared. Gates wanted an elite team of specialized cops similar to groups like the Army Rangers or Navy SEALs that could respond to riots, barricades, shootouts, or hostage-takings with more skill and precision than everyday patrol officers.

The concept caught on, particularly after a couple of high-profile, televised confrontations between Gates' SWAT team and a Black Panther holdout in 1969, and then with the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1973. Given the rioting, protests, and general social unrest of the time, Gates' idea quickly grew popular in law enforcement circles, particularly in cities worried about rioting and domestic terrorism.

From Gates' lone team in LA, according to a New York Times investigation, the number of SWAT teams in the U.S. grew to 500 by 1975. By 1982, nearly 60 percent of American cities with 50,000 or more people had a SWAT team.

Throughout those early years, SWAT teams were generally used as Gates had intended. They deployed when there was a suspect, gunman or escaped fugitive who posed an immediate threat to the public, using force to defuse an already violent situation.

By 1995, however, nearly 90 percent of cities with 50,000 or more people had a SWAT team -- and many had several, according to Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University, who in the late 1990s conducted two highly publicized surveys of police departments across the country, and a follow-up survey several years later. Even in smaller towns -- municipalities with 25,000 to 50,000 people -- Kraska found that the number of SWAT teams increased by more than 300 percent between 1984 and 1995. By 2000, 75 percent of those towns also had their own SWAT team.

Kraska estimates that total number of SWAT raids in America jumped from just a few hundred per year in the 1970s, to a few thousand by the early 1980s, to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s.

The vast majority of those raids are to serve warrants on people suspected of nonviolent drug crimes. Police forces were no longer reserving SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics for events that presented an immediate threat to the public. They were now using them mostly as an investigative tool in drug cases, creating violent confrontations with people suspected of nonviolent, consensual crimes.

It was during the Reagan administration that the SWAT-ification of America really began to accelerate. Reagan (and a compliant Congress) passed policies encouraging cooperation and mutual training between the military and police agencies. The president set up joint task forces in which domestic cops and soldiers worked together on anti-drug operations. And, with some help from Congress, he nudged the Pentagon to start loaning or even giving surplus military gear to law enforcement agencies. Subsequent administrations continued all of these policies -- and a number of new ones.

After Reagan, new federal policies provided yet more incentive for militarization. In 1988, Congress created the Byrne grant program, which gives money to local police departments and prosecutors for a number of different criminal justice purposes. But a large portion of Byrne grant money over the years has been earmarked for anti-drug policing. Competition among police agencies for the pool of cash has made anti-drug policing a high priority. And once there was federal cash available for drug busts, drug raids became more common.

Byrne grants also created and funded anti-narcotics multi-jurisdictional task forces. These roving teams of drug cops are often entirely funded with grants and through asset forfeiture, and usually don't report to any single police agency. The poor incentives and lack of real accountability have produced some catastrophic results, like the mass drug raid debacles in Tulia and Hearne, Texas, in the late 1990s.

But politicians love the Byrne grant program. Congressmen get to put out press releases announcing the new half-million dollar grant they've just helped secure for the hometown police department. And everyone gets to look tough on crime.

During the Clinton administration, Congress passed what's now known as the "1033 Program," which formalized and streamlined the Reagan administration's directive to the Pentagon to share surplus military gear with domestic police agencies. Since then, millions of pieces of military equipment designed for use on a battlefield have been transferred to local cops -- SWAT teams and others -- including machine guns, tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, bayonets, and weapons that shoot .50-caliber ammunition. Clinton also created the "Troops to Cops" program, which offered grants to police departments who hired soldiers returning from battle, contributing even further to the militarization of the police force.

Even programs with noble aims have gone awry. Clinton also created the Community-Oriented Policing Services program (COPS), the aim of which was to promote a less confrontational style of policing. But subsequent investigations by publications in Portland, Ore., and Madison, Wis., showed that those grants often went to start or fund SWAT teams. In fact, in interviews with police chiefs as part of his study, Kraska found that many of them believed SWAT raids and militarized policing were perfectly consistent with a community policing approach to crime control.

There hasn't been a major effort to quantify the militarization trend since Kraska's studies in the late 1990s. That's what the ACLU is hoping to do with this investigation.

"You may remember the story from late last year about Pargould, Arkansas, where the mayor and police chief announced that they were going to send the SWAT team out on routine patrols in 'problem neighborhoods' to stop and harass the people who lived in them. After the story made national news, they changed that policy. But how many places is this happening where it isn't making news? That's one of the things we're hoping to find out," Dansky said.

One problem the ACLU may run into is a lack of cooperation from the police agencies it's investigating. Kraska said that when he conducted his surveys in the 1990s, police departments were forthcoming, and even boastful about their SWAT teams. "We had a really high response rate," he said. "But when the reports came out and were critical, and the press coverage was critical, they stopped cooperating." Kraska said the response rate for his follow-up survey dropped off, and that police agencies haven't cooperated with subsequent similar efforts by other criminologists.

In 2009, Maryland passed a SWAT transparency law. It requires every police agency in the state with a SWAT team to provide data twice per year on the number of times the SWAT team is deployed, the reason for the deployment, whether any shots were fired, and whether the raid resulted in criminal charges. The effort to get the law passed was led by Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md., who was the victim of a highly publicized mistaken raid on his home in which a Prince George's County SWAT team shot and killed his two black Labradors. The bill puts no restrictions on SWAT teams or how they're used. Its only purpose is transparency. Still, it was vigorously opposed by every police agency in the state.

"This is one of the most intrusive things a government can do," Calvo said. "These are government agents, breaking down your door, invading your home. And yet it's all done in secret. In most cases, no one knows what criteria police are using when they decide how to serve a search warrant. There's no transparency, there's no oversight."

"After the law was passed," he continued, "we found out that there are ZIP codes in Maryland where every search warrant is served by a SWAT team. I mean, even if you don't care about civil liberties, in some places less than half of these raids result in so much as a single arrest. So you're conducting these dangerous, volatile raids, you're terrifying people and putting them at risk, and you're serving no law enforcement purpose."

Neither Kraska nor Calvo are optimistic that the ACLU will get much cooperation. "I'd imagine they'll mostly be declined," Calvo said.

"My experience is that they'll have a very difficult time getting comprehensive, forthright information," Kraska said. "If the goal here is to impose some transparency, you have to understand, that's not what the SWAT industry wants."

Dansky said the ACLU is prepared to go to court to get access to the information it's seeking. "We don't expect we'll need to for information on the equipment these police agencies have received from the Defense Department or Homeland Security," she said. "But if we need to challenge these departments on the information about their SWAT teams, we'll do that. And if these police agencies do refuse to release this public information to our affiliates, that in itself is something the public should know."

The National Sheriffs Association and the National Association of Chiefs of Police did not respond to HuffPost requests for comment. But Mark Lomax, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association -- a trade association and lobbying group for SWAT teams -- said he has no problem with releasing the information the ACLU is requesting.

"There's nothing to hide here," Lomax said. "The only stipulations I'd add is that I'd oppose releasing information about the specific tactics a police department uses. There also might be legal reasons for not releasing information -- if cases are in litigation, for example. I'd also be concerned about how the data is used. You can make information like that say whatever you want it to. But in general I wouldn't have a problem with making it available."

It's almost certain that if the police agencies cooperate, the ACLU will find that the militarization trend has accelerated since Kraska's studies more than a decade ago. All of the policies, incentives and funding mechanisms that were driving the trend then are still in effect now. And most of them have grown in size and scope.

The George W. Bush administration actually began scaling down the Byrne and COPS programs in the early 2000s, part of a general strategy of leaving law enforcement to states and localities. But the Obama administration has since resurrected both programs. The Byrne program got a $2 billion surge in funding as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, by far the largest budget in the program's 25-year history. Obama also gave the COPS program $1.55 billion that same year, a 250 percent increase over its 2008 budget, and again the largest budget in the program's history. Vice President Joe Biden had championed both programs during his time in the Senate.

The Pentagon's 1033 program has also exploded under Obama. In the program's monthly newsletter (Motto: "From Warfighter to Crimefighter"), its director announced in October 2011 that his office had given away a record $500 million in military gear in fiscal year 2011, which he noted, "passes the previous mark by several hundred million dollars." He added, "I believe we can exceed that in FY 12.”

Then there are the Department of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism grants. The Center for Investigative Reporting found in a 2011 investigation that since 2001, DHS has given out more than $34 billion in grants to police departments across the country, many of which have been used to purchase military-grade guns, tanks, armor, and armored personnel carriers. The grants have gone to such unlikely terrorism targets as Fargo, N.D.; Canyon County, Idaho; and Tuscaloosa, Ala.

In the tiny town of Keene, N.H.,, the citizens protested plans to purchase a Lenco Bearcat armored personnel carrier with a DHS grant. One resident told HuffPost last year, "Keene is a beautiful place. It's gorgeous, and it's safe, and we love it here. We just don't want to live in the kind of place where there's an armored personnel carrier parked outside of City Hall ... It's just not who we are."

They succeeded only in delaying the purchase by a few months. Keene now has a Bearcat. To town officials, it was a no-brainer. Keene was getting a $400,000 vehicle from the federal government, essentially for free. Why wouldn't it accept?

"From all indications, I would think the DHS grants and increased federal funding could only speed up the militarization process," Kraska said. "And now you have an entire industry that has sprung up just to take advantage of those grants -- and to lobby to make sure they keep coming."

Like the Maryland law, the ACLU program is really only seeking information. Once it gets the information, Dansky said the organization will analyze the figures and recommend policies to minimize the effects of police militarization on civil liberties. "We're also concerned that these tactics are disproportionately used against poor people, and in communities of color," Dansky said. "And SWAT is really only part of it. The effects of militarization also happen beyond and outside of just an increase in SWAT deployments."

Of course, you can always gather information showing a troubling rise in the use of military weapons and tactics among domestic police agencies, make sensible recommendations for reform, and get no interest at all from politicians and policymakers. Kraska's studies in the late 1990s, and subsequent media reports, did nothing to stem the increased militarization of the police.

And in Maryland, the transparency law has shown that police departments in the state are using SWAT tactics in precisely the ways critics have claimed: to break into homes to serve warrants on people suspected of low-level drug crimes. Many times, they're not even finding enough contraband to make an arrest. Yet there haven't been any calls in the state to reform the way SWAT teams are used.

"I wish the ACLU success," Calvo said. "And I suspect that once they force the police agencies to cooperate, they'll find that this problem is even more dramatic and pronounced than most people know. But then the question is, now what? Even if you can show that people are being victimized and terrorized by these tactics -- and to no good end -- if no one cares, then what does it matter?"
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
User avatar
Pele'sDaughter
 
Posts: 1917
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:45 am
Location: Texas
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Militarization of the Police - Steve Martinot

Postby FourthBase » Wed Mar 06, 2013 4:46 pm

“Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight,
that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.” - Bill Russell
User avatar
FourthBase
 
Posts: 7057
Joined: Thu May 05, 2005 4:41 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Militarization of the Police - Steve Martinot

Postby Sounder » Mon Jun 15, 2020 10:28 am

Sounder
 
Posts: 4054
Joined: Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Militarization of the Police - Steve Martinot

Postby Sounder » Wed Jun 17, 2020 12:17 pm

From Occupation to ‘Occupy’: The Israelification of American domestic security


One of the first comprehensive surveys of Israeli training of US local and federal law enforcement officials.
By Max Blumenthal

(Editor’s note: The eruption of national protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd have shed new light on Israel’s training of local police officers across the country.

100 members of the 800-strong Minneapolis police department were trained at a conference in Israel in 2012. That means at least one of every eight members the city’s force has been influenced by the methods of an occupying apartheid entity.

The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal produced one of the first comprehensive surveys of Israeli training of US local and federal law enforcement officials in the following article published by Al Akhbar English in 2011.)

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics have been used to suppress the Occupy movement in general.

The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception.

“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We’re in a global war.”
Changing the way we do business

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is at the heart of American-Israeli law enforcement collaboration. JINSA is a Jerusalem and Washington DC-based think tank known for stridently neoconservative policy positions on Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians and its brinkmanship with Iran. The group’s board of directors boasts a Who’s Who of neocon ideologues. Two former JINSA advisers who have also consulted for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, went on to serve in the Department of Defense under President George W. Bush, playing influential roles in the push to invade and occupy Iraq.

Through its Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), JINSA claims to have arranged Israeli-led training sessions for over 9000 American law enforcement officials at the federal, state and municipal level. “The Israelis changed the way we do business regarding homeland security in New Jersey,” Richard Fuentes, the NJ State Police Superintendent, said after attending a 2004 JINSA-sponsored Israel trip and a subsequent JINSA conference alongside 435 other law enforcement officers.

During a 2004 LEEP trip, JINSA brought 14 senior American law enforcement officials to Israel to receive instruction from their counterparts. The Americans were trained in “how to secure large venues, such as shopping malls, sporting events and concerts,” JINSA’s website reported. Escorted by Brigadier General Simon Perry, an Israeli police attaché and former Mossad official, the group toured the Israeli separation wall, now a mandatory stop for American cops on junkets to Israel. “American officials learned about the mindset of a suicide bomber and how to spot trouble signs,” according to JINSA. And they were schooled in Israeli killing methods. “Although the police are typically told to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the Israelis are teaching [American] officers to aim for a suspect’s head so as not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso,” the New York Times reported.

Cathy Lanier, now the Chief of Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, was among the law enforcement officials junketed to Israel by JINSA. “I was with the bomb units and the SWAT team and all of those high profile specialized [Israeli] units and I learned a tremendous amount,” Lanier reflected. “I took 82 pages of notes while I was there which I later brought back and used to formulate a lot of what I later used to create and formulate the Homeland Security terrorism bureau in the DC Metropolitan Police department.”

Some of the police chiefs who have taken part in JINSA’s LEEP program have done so under the auspices of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a private non-governmental group with close ties to the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck Wexler, the executive director of PERF, was so enthusiastic about the program that by 2005 he had begun organizing trips to Israel sponsored by PERF, bringing numerous high-level American police officials to receive instruction from their Israeli counterparts.

PERF gained notoriety when Wexler confirmed that his group coordinated police raids in 16 cities across America against “Occupy” protest encampments. As many as 40 cities have sought PERF advice on suppressing the “Occupy” movement and other mass protest activities. Wexler did not respond to my requests for an interview.
Lessons from Israel to Auschwitz

Besides JINSA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has positioned itself as an important liaison between American police forces and the Israeli security-intelligence apparatus. Though the ADL promotes itself as a Jewish civil rights group, it has provoked controversy by publishing a blacklist of organizations supporting Palestinian rights, and for condemning a proposal to construct an Islamic community center in downtown New York, several blocks from Ground Zero, on the basis that some opponents of the project were entitled to “positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.”

Through the ADL’s Advanced Training School course on Extremist and Terrorist Threats, over 700 law enforcement personnel from 220 federal and local agencies including the FBI and CIA have been trained by Israeli police and intelligence commanders. This year, the ADL brought 15 high-level American police officials to Israel for instruction from the country’s security apparatus. According to the ADL, over 115 federal, state and local law enforcement executives have undergone ADL-organized training sessions in Israel since the program began in 2003. “I can honestly say that the training offered by ADL is by far the most useful and current training course I have ever attended,” Deputy Commissioner Thomas Wright of the Philadelphia Police Department commented after completing an ADL program this year. The ADL’s relationship with the Washington DC Police Department is so cozy its members are invited to accompany DC cops on “ride along” patrols.

The ADL claims to have trained over 45,000 American law enforcement officials through its Law Enforcement and Society program, which “draws on the history of the Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution,” the group’s website stated. All new FBI agents and intelligence analysts are required to attend the ADL program, which is incorporated into three FBI training programs. According to officialFBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”
Fighting “crimiterror”

Among the most prominent Israeli government figure to have influenced the practices of American law enforcement officials is Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service and current member of Knesset who recently introduced legislation widely criticized as anti-democratic. During the Second Intifada, Dichter ordered several bombings on densely populated Palestinian civilian areas, including one on the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza that resulted in the death of 15 innocent people, including 8 children, and 150 injuries. “After each success, the only thought is, ‘Okay, who’s next?’” Dichter said of the “targeted” assassinations he has ordered.

Despite his dubious human rights record and apparently dim view of democratic values, or perhaps because of them, Dichter has been a key figure in fostering cooperation between Israeli security forces and American law enforcement. In 2006, while Dichter was serving as Israel’s Minister of Public Security, he spoke in Boston, Massachusetts before the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Seated beside FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Dichter told the 10,000 police officers in the crowd that there was an “intimate connection between fighting criminals and fighting terrorists.” Dichter declared that American cops were actually “fighting crimiterrorists.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Dichter was “greeted by a hail of applause, as he was hugged by Mueller, who described Dichter as his mentor in anti-terror tactics.”

A year after Dichter’s speech, he and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff signed a joint memorandum pledging security collaboration between America and Israel on issues ranging from airport security to emergency planning. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano authorized a new joint memorandum with Israeli Transport and Road Safety Minister Israel Katz shoring up cooperation between the US Transportation Security Agency – the agency in charge of day-to-day airport security – and Israel’s Security Department. The recent joint memorandum also consolidated the presence of US Homeland Security law enforcement personnel on Israeli soil. “The bond between the United States and Israel has never been stronger,” Napolitano remarked at a recent summit of AIPAC, the leading outfit of America’s Israel lobby, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The Demographic Unit

For the New York Police Department, collaboration with Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus became a top priority after 9/11. Just months after the attacks on New York City, the NYPD assigned a permanent, taxpayer-funded liaison officer to Tel Aviv. Under the leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, ties between the NYPD and Israel have deepened by the day. Kelly embarked on his first trip to Israel in early 2009 to demonstrate his support for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, a one-sided attack that left over 1400 Gaza residents dead in three weeks and led a United Nations fact-finding mission to conclude that Israeli military and government officials had committed war crimes.

Kelly returned to Israel the following year to speak at the Herziliya Conference, an annual gathering of neoconservative security and government officials who obsess over supposed “demographic threats.” After Kelly appeared on stage, the Herziliya crowd was addressed by the pro-Israel academic Martin Kramer, who claimed that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was helping to reduce the numbers of “superfluous young men of fighting age.” Kramer added, “If a state can’t control these young men, then someone else will.”

Back in New York, the NYPD set up a secret “Demographics Unit” designed to spy on and monitor Muslim communities around the city. The unit was developed with input and intensive involvement by the CIA, which still refuses to name the former Middle East station chief it has posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. Since 2002, the NYPD has dispatched undercover agents known as “rakers” and “mosque crawlers” into Pakistani-American bookstores and restaurants to gauge community anger over US drone strikes inside Pakistan, and into Palestinian hookah bars and mosques to search out signs of terror recruitment and clandestine funding. “If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn,” the Associated Press reported. “The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny.”

The Israeli imprimatur on the NYPD’s Demographics Unit is unmistakable. As a former police official told the Associated Press, the Demographics Unit has attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.”
Shop ‘til you’re stopped

At Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, security personnel target non-Jewish and non-white passengers, especially Arabs, as a matter of policy. The most routinely harassed passengers are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who must brace themselves for five-hour interrogation sessions and strip searches before flying. Those singled out for extra screening by Shin Bet officers are sent to what many Palestinians from Israel call the “Arab room,” where they are subjected to humiliating questioning sessions (former White House Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala encountered such mistreatment during a visit to Israel last year). Some Palestinians are forbidden from speaking to anyone until takeoff, and may be menaced by Israeli flight attendants during the flight. In one documented case, a six-month-old was awoken for a strip search by Israeli Shin Bet personnel. Instances of discrimination against Arabs at Ben Gurion International are too numerous to detail – several incidents occur each day – but a few of the more egregious instances were outlined in a 2007 petition the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed with the country’s Supreme Court.

Though the Israeli system of airline security contains dubious benefits and clearly deleterious implications for civil liberties, it is quietly and rapidly migrating into major American airports. Security personnel at Boston’s Logan International Airport have undergone extensive training from Israeli intelligence personnel, learning to apply profiling and behavioral assessment techniques against American citizens that were initially tested on Palestinians. The new procedures began in August, when so-called Behavior Detection Officers were placed in security queues at Logan’s heavily trafficked Terminal A. Though the procedures have added to traveler stress while netting exactly zero terrorists, they are likely to spread to other cities. “I would like to see a lot more profiling” in American airports, said Yossi Sheffi, an Israeli-born risk analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Israeli techniques now dictate security procedures at the Mall of America, a gargantuan shopping mall in Bloomington, Minnesota that has become a major tourist attraction. The new methods took hold in 2005 when the mall hired a former Israeli army sergeant named Mike Rozin to lead a special new security unit. Rozin, who once worked with a canine unit at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, instructed his employees at the Mall of America to visually profile every shopper, examining their expressions for suspicious signs. His security team accosts and interrogates an average of 1200 shoppers a year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

One of the thousands who fell into Rozin’s dragnet was Najam Qureshi, a Pakistani-American mall vendor whose father accidentally left his cell phone on a table in the mall food court. A day after the incident, FBI agents appeared at Qureshi’s doorstep to ask if he knew anyone seeking to harm the United States. An army veteran interrogated for two hours by Rozin’s men for taking video inside the mall sobbed openly about his experience to reporters. Meanwhile, another man, Emile Khalil, was visited by FBI agents after mall security stopped him for taking photographs of the dazzling consumer haven.

“I think that the threat of terrorism in the United States is going to become an unfortunate part of American life,” Rozin remarked to American Jewish World. And as long as the threat persists in the public’s mind, Israeli securitocrats like Rozin will never have to worry about the next paycheck.
“Occupy” meets the occupation

When a riot squad from the New York Police Department destroyed and evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, department leadership drew on the anti-terror tactics they had refined since the 9/11 attacks. According to the New York Times, the NYPD deployed “counterterrorism measures” to mobilize large numbers of cops for the lightning raid on Zuccotti. The use of anti-terror techniques to suppress a civilian protest complemented harsh police measures demonstrated across the country against the nationwide “Occupy” movement, from firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into unarmed crowds to blasting demonstrators with the LRAD sound cannon.

Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much they will inform police repression of future examples of street protest. What can be said for certain is that the Israelification of American law enforcement has intensified police fear and hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”
Max Blumenthal

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Sounder
 
Posts: 4054
Joined: Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Militarization of the Police - Steve Martinot

Postby Grizzly » Thu Jun 18, 2020 3:28 am

viewtopic.php?p=688613#p688613
Also, "Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2001 Terrorist Attacks"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00394.x
----
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/01/soon-to-come-to-a-place-near-you-riots-and-suppression-.html?cid=6a00d8341c640e53ef0167612a42c3970b#comment-6a00d8341c640e53ef0167612a42c3970b
Former New York City Police Commissioner and Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton said Tuesday that it was important for local police agencies to exchange and coordinate information with the CIA regarding terrorism.

“In dealing with information intelligence as it relates to terrorism, the CIA has a lot of information that is appropriate for use by American police forces,” he said.

He noted that most terrorists were homegrown, not foreigners

The question is, why does the CIA need to "coordinate" with civilian law enforcement across the nation? I suspect they know what's coming, heck, most of us here have known where this was headed for years now, only we were kooks for suggesting such. They are in the process of setting up a secret police network in conjction w/ffusion centers and infraguard/ DHS for domestic enforcement.

They already have, through the use of so-called 'fusion' stations in major metro areas, funded through DHS. Dallas' particular hybrid enforcement program goes under the moniker of MOSAIC. It is a domestic spying program.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
User avatar
Grizzly
 
Posts: 4722
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:15 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)


Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 42 guests