How America’s Wars Abroad Contribute to Police Brutality at Home

"Escalation and threat inflation have become routine in American policing as they are in American foreign policy"

The indefensible death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers and the indiscriminate police violence in subsequent protests have returned police misconduct to the center of our national conversation.

It is not a conversation we may quickly or easily conclude. The problems in American policing are multitude and systemic, matters of both policy and culture. Much of this can only be corrected at the state or local level, and as there are around 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, this is a monumental task. In very few cases could sweeping federal action affect any substantive reform.

But one way in which Washington is directly implicated in police brutality is its contribution to the militarization of local police departments through the Pentagon’s 1033 Program and the so-called “war on terror” more broadly. Often in concert with the war on drugs, the fight against terrorism has been used to blur the lines between the military and the police, arming ostensible peace officers with mindsets, tactics, and weapons of war.

Many Americans first learned of the 1033 Program in 2014, when both peaceful protest and destructive unrest broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. Photos from Ferguson showed police rolling through suburban streets in armored vehicles which, to the civilian eye, looked like tanks in a war zone. They looked like military gear because they were military gear — Defense Department castoffs given to local police departments for counter-drug and counter-terror operations.

The 1033 Program provides much more than vehicles. Police can also request weapons including bayonets, automatic rifles, and grenade launchers, as well as ammunition, body armor, robots, watercraft, and aircraft including surveillance drones. Former President Obama placed a few limits on the equipment transfers in 2015; Present Trump has since lifted them.

The outcome was predictable: Police never felt constrained by the Pentagon’s suggestion for how its hand-me-downs should be used. Cops use military gear when responding even to nonviolent protests, as we’ve seen yet again this past week. They use it in many more mundane situations, too.

Heavily armed SWAT teams, originally created for barricade and hostage situations, are widely employed beyond that intended purpose. Documented uses include arresting an unarmed optometrist for privately betting on football games, ransacking a backyard chicken coop, preventing unlicensed barbering, and forestalling a suicide attempt by preemptively killing the suicidal man.

Armored vehicles are used to patrol beaches, malls, theme parks, and college ball games. The St. Louis County Police Department, which includes Ferguson in its purview, uses a SWAT team to execute all search warrants. It is not unique in that practice. Escalation and threat inflation have become routine in American policing as they are in American foreign policy.

The 1033 Program, which predates post-9/11 counterterror efforts, is not the only way the our endless wars has fostered police militarization in America. Two other aspects deserve special attention.

First, less visible than armored vehicles is the civil liberties threat posed by the militarization of police intelligence collection and use. The “war on terror” served as justification for a massive expansion of domestic surveillance in America, and that expansion has trickled down from Washington to police departments around the country. Federal agencies share the data they collect via warrantless mass surveillance with state and local law enforcement. This spying is used to investigate suspected crimes with no connection to terrorism.

It’s also used to spy on people not suspected of any crime at all: Washington “loosened or ignored law enforcement guidelines restricting intelligence gathering [by] removing or weakening the criminal predicates necessary to ensure a proper focus on illegal activity,” a Brennan Center report explains. That produced “increased police spying on minorities and political dissidents and increased efforts to escape judicial and public oversight.” Meanwhile, federal funds buy police departments ever more invasive spying technology, including Stingray cell-site simulators whose use is actively concealed from the public.

Beyond the gear and surveillance, however, perhaps the most damaging effect of war on terror-encouraged police militarization is psychological. It pushes police officers engaging with the public to behave as they look, to act like soldiers dealing with enemy combatants. The task conforms to the tools provided — with deadly result.

“Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he’ll reasonably think that his job isn’t simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger,” observed The Concourse writer Greg Howard amid the Ferguson demonstrations in 2014. “If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they’re working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy.”

This dynamic is deliberate: Police officers are explicitly trained to conceive of themselves as warriors in battle, always on high alert and prepared to kill. And it is disproportionately true in black and other minority communities, as the deaths of Floyd and Brown — and Breonna Taylor and Atatiana Jefferson and Philando Castile and Walter Scott and Tamir Rice and Aiyana Jones and so many more — steadily remind us. As long as police continue to function as an occupying military force, that list will continue to grow.

Source: Responsible Statecraft

26 Comments
  1. LS says

    The police are not the problem; the blacks are the problem.

    1. Al Carbone says

      both are the problem and I wish blacks and cops kill each other off copsucker

      1. disqus_3BrONUAJno says

        Are you paid to be an agent provocateur or do you do it as a hobby?

        1. Al Carbone says

          just speaking the truth what I believe and I don’t give a f#ck if you like it

          1. disqus_3BrONUAJno says

            That is fine as long as you don’t mind living by yourself in a fantasyland.

            1. Al Carbone says

              the fantasy world you live in was just broken. imagine how dumb you have to be to think the same govt that https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9d9d62183018fcf5913020aeac5bb62d530817ac1839a7cfcff4a27d860df99d.png for 50 years spent 7 trillion raising tens of millions of black criminals to be unleashed on the public is gonna save you with their cops? one day they cut a check to fund the police then next day cut a check for Sec Ape housing.

    2. Séamus Ó Néill says

      ……and you’re not a racist ?

      1. LS says

        The general problem is this: Most of you cannot distinguish between idea-o-logy and rational thought; and/or you are lacking in the natural inclination to do so.

        1. Séamus Ó Néill says

          Don’t ever consider yourself intellectually superior to anyone else. This “most of you” attitude is certainly a sign of an insecure under-achiever who compensates by attempting to patronise others….just try and be yourself, it may help.

          1. LS says

            Well, if you fell for that ‘racism’ stuff, we certainly aren’t intellectual equals.

      2. BADGER BADGERISM (GRANDWORLDDR says

        FUCK RACIST..WHAT IF I AM RACIST…WTF YOU GONNA DO
        NOTHING…AS I END YOU

      3. LS says

        ‘racism’ is not even an intellectually valid concept–it is an idea-o-logical concept.

        Race is real, it is physical, it can be quantified in a lab. And it means the difference between not having the wheel and putting a man on the moon. It has consequences for criminality, intelligence, psychopathy, sociopathy and other important factors that control behavior and outcomes.

        There aint no ‘-ism’ about it. And it is not intellectually valid to suggest there is, or adopt an ideology that implies there is.

        Listen, if the left tries to normalize the concept of ‘familyism’–are you going to go along with that too? Are you going to someday write:

        “……and you’re not a familyist ?”

        Good grief.

        1. Séamus Ó Néill says

          Exactly, you’re a recist and judging by your post, you’ll advance any argument and hide behind irrelevant inane rubbish to mask that fact !

          1. LS says

            ‘racism’ is not even an intellectually valid concept–it is an idea-o-logical concept.

            Race is real, it is physical, it can be quantified in a lab. And it means
            the difference between not having the wheel and putting a man on the
            moon. It has consequences for criminality, intelligence, psychopathy,
            sociopathy and other important factors that control behavior and
            outcomes.

            There aint no ‘-ism’ about it. And it is not
            intellectually valid to suggest there is, or adopt an ideology that
            implies there is.

            Listen, if the left tries to normalize the
            concept of ‘familyism’–are you going to go along with that too?

            1. Jamie Tran says

              I appreciate your being able to engage in thoughts that are completely outside the bounds of reason. That is quite skill you have.

            2. LS says

              May your children mate with Negroes.

          2. cechas vodobenikov says

            I suggest that one cannot reason with a racist like ls; she actually denies that this concept is valid

          3. LS says

            And may your children also mate with Negroes.

            1. Séamus Ó Néill says

              You’re just the type of uncouth and uncultivated plebeian that give the human race cause for concern….but if you can live with yourself, without apprehension, I suppose we’ll have to !

            2. LS says

              I will not be fooled and manipulated by clever predators that normalize culturally and racially destructive concepts like ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’. If that makes me an ‘uncouth and uncultivated plebeian’ in your eyes, so be it.

              And if you think ‘racism’ is an intellectually valid concept, then you should have no problem mating your children to Negroes, because race does not matter–right?

        2. disqus_3BrONUAJno says

          Intellectually valid concepts run from you.

  2. disqus_3BrONUAJno says

    Treason is defined in the Constitution at Article 3, Section 3, as consisting “only in levying War against (the United States), or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
    All members of the American military take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (and to) bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
    When the military is committed to foreign actions without a declaration of war by Congress, as required by Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 11 of the Constitution, that is a violation of the Constitution, arguably the action of domestic enemies.
    When a member of the military participates in an unconstitutional foreign military deployment, s/he violates both the Constitution and his/her oath to “support and defend” it, giving “aid and comfort” to it’s “domestic enemies,” committing treason by the definition given by the Constitution.

  3. BADGER BADGERISM (GRANDWORLDDR says

    THAT JUST CHANGED…POLICE WERE SHOWN REAL POWER..THEY ARE NOW SHOWN TO BE PUNK COWARDS THAT STAND DOWN AS THE NEIGHBORHOOD BURNS
    THEN GROVEL AT THE FEET OF THE BLACK MAN
    POLICE STFU AND GTFOOTW…THE MILITIA WILL DO THE PROTECTING
    YOU PUNK ASS COWARDS THAT GANG UP ON ONE MAN BUT WHEN RIOTS COME YOU RUN AND HIDE…TAKE OFF THAT BADGE YOU YELLOW BELLY SCUM…THE CITIZENS WILL DEFEND

  4. cechas vodobenikov says

    amerikan police like their people are inherently primitive and violent—these “anti authoritarian” children throw tantrums like children and are insecure like children—long observed by sociologists, artists, etc….indeed amerikan females r so anxious insecure—amerikan males more, that they are required to take “parent effectiveness training classes to learn how to raise their children—
    “amerikan parent teach their children to have bad manners”. Geoffrey Gorer
    amerikans r s insecure that they award people for doing nothing—and only amerikans use the term “self conscious” to mean insecurity”…my Serb friend found that all the amerikans he supervised complained to his director when he informed them that the quality of their work was poor–his director told him that you can tell this an amerikan, you must tell them that “there is room for improvement”. hilarious insecurity!
    “amerikans are not at all happy—they feel themselves lacking in something. It is as if all the sensitiveness has dried up ion amerikans. the crystallization of love is impossible in the USA. I admire their kind of happiness, but I do not envy it: it is the happiness of a different and inferior species”.
    Stendhal

  5. William Lawlor says

    and guess where the training for these brutes originates……you got it, the militarized state in the Middle East that routinely tortures and kills its ‘enemies’

  6. Ivan says

    Wow <a href=”anti-empire.com”>!!!</a>

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