We, the People, have become the new enemy.
While the vigor of people’s protest against the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown was a surprise to some, the real shock was that police in Ferguson, Mo., a small town of 20,000 outside St. Louis, had heavy-duty war weapons and vehicles which they didn’t hesitate to aim at U.S. citizens.
Suddenly armored vehicles and police officers wearing combat gear confronted the population. TV news reports contained images that people in the U.S. had not seen before within the borders of their country.
A media spotlight shined suddenly on what had been a concealed development in the United States—the militarization of the police. As the U.S. Department of Defense pulls out of Iraq and Afghanistan, the weapons and vehicles of war are being brought back home and made available to U.S. police, often through the Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security is the department that oversees the ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) paramilitary forces to round up undocumented immigrants inside the United States.
“The police today may be more militarized than the military,” writes Radley Balko in his 2013 book, “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” Indeed, while he was mayor of New York City, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, boasted, “I have my own army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world.”
And the transfer of weapons to the police hasn’t been limited to big cities. In little Palm Springs, Calif., the Desert Sun reported that “the federal program that sent decommissioned military weapons to police in Ferguson, Mo. also armed law enforcement across the Coachella Valley.”
“Over roughly two decades, the federal Excess Property Program, or 1033 Program, has placed at least one armored vehicle, two helicopters as well as hundreds of rifles, gas launchers and helmets into the hands of the Riverside County sheriff’s deputies and police in Cathedral City and Palm Springs,” said the Desert Sun.
The Coachella Valley is the northern extension of the Sonora Desert, but irrigation has transformed it into a major agricultural area. Like Ferguson, it is not an area where police armed for war would be expected.
In a June 2014 study “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports that the police department in Maricopa County, Ariz.—led by the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio—“has stockpiled a combined total of 120 assault rifles, five armored vehicles, and ten helicopters. This arsenal was acquired mainly through the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, which transfers military-grade weaponry to state and local police departments, free of charge.”
As usual, the excuse given to people in the U.S. for all this weaponry is the need to protect U.S. borders from immigrants, but the weaponry now has been trained on U.S. citizens. “Arming border communities for battle gives the ACLU serious cause for concern,” says the report—concern for everybody’s civil rights.
When the Department of Defense and Homeland Security supply the police with the gear of war, they encourage them to see the people—who they used to “protect and serve”—as an opponent that needs to be contained or killed. Some police have actually been trained on their new weaponry by the U.S. Special Forces—an attack force trained to seek out and destroy their adversaries.
And with disaffection growing as the economy worsens, We, the People, have become the new enemy.
