Demilitarize the police

This summer, I wrote for a website called ForceChange.org. There, I've written about topics ranging from social-economic issues (salary caps for highly-paid CEOs) to medicine (e.g., the importance of changing patient-doctor relationships and the need for better care for patients with disabilities) to the environment (urging policymakers to increase taxes on gas and encouraging people to stop eating meat). But to my own surprise, the issue I was most compelled to write about this summer was a very basic human right: the right to exist freely in this country without regard to skin color.

Police militarization is on the rise in the United States, with a person of color (typically male) dying at the hands and guns of police officers at a rate of once a day, on average. Brutal treatment in and out of jail (as in the case of Nubia Bowe) and inconceivable treatment of individuals during arrests (as in the case of an elderly woman doing nothing wrong other than standing at the side of a highway) are also more likely to target people of color. Of course, some of these incidents make national news, while others don't (such as the death of 16-year-old Victor Villalpando earlier this summer).

What is equally striking is the incarceration rate of men of color compared to white men. In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander writes about the new system of slavery that abides in this country: incarceration. The mire of the U.S. law system makes it nearly impossible to argue that an arrest took place based on race, leaving victims of racism very few avenues to escape the maze of the jails and courts that await them. The so called "war on drugs" has been a huge player in this racist frenzy--since the 80s, law enforcement agencies have been incentivized to make drug arrests and have been given access to (guess what?) paramilitary equipment as their arrests for drug charges increased.

Some the issues are described in more depth in my most recent petition on Force Change. Check it out if you like (and please sign, if you agree!). I close that post with a snippet of a poem from Langston Hughes--I include it in its entirety here. I find the poem to hit deeply but to find a place of hope that may be difficult. The system is broken. We must take steps to change that.

Let America be America Again
Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? 
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

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! 

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]

Photo credit: