Support Legislation to Demilitarize Police

Support Legislation to Demilitarize Police

Excerpt: The U.S. government has been providing military-style weapons and vehicles to local police precincts under the guise of the propagating the wars on terrorism and drugs. The spending on this equipment is egregious and the use of these forces against citizens is leading American cities to resemble police states. Join in supporting new legislation to stop providing such equipment to police precincts and to demilitarize law enforcement across the country.

Target: Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John Boehner

Goal: Support legislation to demilitarize law enforcement in the United States.

As comedian-turned-serious-news-reporter John Oliver recently put it, singing along with muppets, "It's a fact that needs to spoken: America's prisons are broken." Incarceration rates in the U.S. are egregiously high, nearing 1% of the population, according to a policy think tank called the Prison Policy Initiative, What's more, people (especially men) of color are vastly overrepresented in the pool of those incarcerated: according to a recent Pew Research study, black men were six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, with a recent University of Michigan Law School study reporting that black men receive harsher sentences on average.

Perhaps worse, increasingly violent militarization of police forces in the U.S. is broken, too. The U.S. government has been outfitting local police precincts with military-grade weaponry as part of the 1033 program, orchestrated by the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency. Under this program, surplus military equipment, including tanks and military weaponry, may be supplied to local U.S. police precincts, with the Washington Post reporting nearly half a billion dollars of equipment given away in 2013 alone. The 1033 program has its roots in the so-called "War on Drugs" and "War on Terrorism" in the U.S.. It arose from the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997, which states, "In considering applications for the transfer of personal property under this section, the Secretary shall give a preference to those applications indicating that the transferred property will be used in the counter-drug or counter-terrorism activities of the recipient agency."

In her recent book, _The New Jim Crow_, Michelle Alexander notes that Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams emerged in the 1960s and were originally used in emergencies (taking prisoners hostage, prison escapes, and the like). Alexander notes that in the early 1980s, there were 3,000 swat deployments but by 2001 the number had increased to 40,000. Alexander goes on to note how in 1981, President Reagan passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which would serve to allow local, state, and federal police to have access to military intelligence and material resources like weapons. Over the years, police precincts which prioritized drug arrests were given these resources as incentives.

Now, SWAT raids regularly occur for minor drug offenses, and nearly daily (every 28 hours), a black man is killed extrajudicially by law enforcement, according to statistics provided by the Malcolm X Grassroots movement. In an horrific recent event in Ferguson, Missouri, police violence led to the death of yet another unarmed young black male and was followed by protests in the town, during which law enforcement shot at and threw teargas at peaceful protesters, also arresting journalists as they rolled through neighborhood streets in military vehicles. The local newspaper the Riverfront Times reported that individuals were also attacked while standing in their own back yards. This included one man who shouted "This my property!", which the _Times_ said "…prompt[ed] police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his face."

This type of militarization leads to a culture in law enforcement where officers are no longer protecting their citizens--they are walking the streets of a battlefield. Join in writing to our Speaker of the House to use his voice to bring back an America where citizens can walk the streets freely, without constant threat of a militarized police.


PETITION LETTER:

Dear Speaker of the House Boehner,

U.S. prisons are broken, and the U.S. law enforcement system is broken. As Senator Rand Paul recently put it, "Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies—where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement."

House representative Hank Johnson, from Georgia, has written proposed legislation to demilitarize local police precincts and to limit the 1033 program which currently allows such precincts to receive military-style weaponry. This legislation would help to ensure that some violence is curbed--for instance, we would prevent the use of over-the-top military tanks roaming town streets and coercing innocent, peaceful protesters into submission with tear gas and rubber bullets. An additional consequence of limiting this type of equipment would be a re-framing of what the relationship of law enforcement officers and citizens should be. Police forces are in police first and foremost to protect the rights of citizens, but in many recent cases, U.S. law enforcement officers have done the precise opposite, endangering individuals without cause and/or with extremity.

As Langston Hughes wrote beautifully in his poem, "Let America be America Again":

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Yours Sincerely,

[Your Name Here]

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