Our Ever-Deadlier Police State
Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
October 24th, 2017
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Above Photo: Mr. Fish
None of the reforms, increased training, diversity programs, community
outreach and gimmicks such as body cameras have blunted America's deadly
police assault, especially against poor people of color. Police forces in
the United States-which, according to The Washington Post, have fatally shot
782 people this year-are unaccountable, militarized monstrosities that
spread fear and terror in poor communities. By comparison, police in England
and Wales killed 62 people in the 27 years between the start of 1990 and the
end of 2016.
Police officers have become rogue predators in impoverished communities.
Under U.S. forfeiture laws, police indiscriminately seize money, real
estate, automobiles and other assets. In many cities, traffic, parking and
other fines are little more than legalized extortion that funds local
government and turns jails into debtor prisons.
Because of a failed court system, millions of young men and women are
railroaded into prison, many for nonviolent offenses. SWAT teams with
military weapons burst into homes often under warrants for nonviolent
offenses, sometimes shooting those inside. Trigger-happy cops pump multiple
rounds into the backs of unarmed men and women and are rarely charged with
murder. And for poor Americans, basic constitutional rights, including due
process, were effectively abolished decades ago.
Jonathan Simon's "Governing Through Crime" and Michelle Alexander's "The New
Jim Crow" point out that what is defined and targeted as criminal activity
by the police and the courts is largely determined by racial inequality and
class, and most importantly by the potential of targeted groups to cause
social and political unrest. Criminal policy, as sociologist Alex S. Vitale
writes in his new book, "The End of Policing," "is structured around the use
of punishment to manage the 'dangerous classes,' masquerading as a system of
justice."
The criminal justice system, at the same time, refuses to hold Wall Street
banks, corporations and oligarchs accountable for crimes that have caused
incalculable damage to the global economy and the ecosystem. None of the
bankers who committed massive acts of fraud and were responsible for the
financial collapse in 2008 have gone to prison even though their crimes
resulted in widespread unemployment, millions of evictions and foreclosures,
homelessness, bankruptcies and the looting of the U.S. Treasury to bail out
financial speculators at taxpayer expense. We live in a two-tiered legal
system, one in which poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for
absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes-which led to Eric
Garner being choked to death by a New York City policeman in 2014-while
crimes of appalling magnitude that wiped out 40 percent of the world's
wealth are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines
and civil enforcement.
The grotesque distortions of the judicial system and the aggressive war on
the poor by the police will get worse under President Trump and Attorney
General Jeff Sessions. There has been a rollback of President Barack Obama's
2015 restrictions on the 1033 Program, a 1989 congressional action that
allows the transfer of military weaponry, including grenade launchers,
armored personnel carriers and .50-caliber machine guns, from the federal
government to local police forces. Since 1997, the Department of Defense has
turned over a staggering $5.1 billion in military hardware to police
departments.
The Trump administration also is resurrecting private prisons in the federal
prison system, accelerating the so-called war on drugs, stacking the courts
with right-wing "law and order" judges and preaching the divisive politics
of punishment and retribution. Police unions enthusiastically embrace these
actions, seeing in them a return to the Wild West mentality that
characterized the brutality of police departments in the 1960s and 1970s,
when radicals, especially black radicals, were murdered with impunity at the
hands of law enforcement. The Praetorian Guard of the elites, as in all
totalitarian systems, will soon be beyond the reach of the law. As Vitale
writes in his book, "Our entire criminal justice system has become a
gigantic revenge factory."
The arguments-including the racist one about "superpredators"-used to
justify the expansion of police power have no credibility, as the gun
violence in south Chicago, abject failure of the war on drugs and vast
expansion of the prison system over the last 40 years illustrate. The
problem is not ultimately in policing techniques and procedures; it is in
the increasing reliance on the police as a form of social control to
buttress a system of corporate capitalism that has turned the working poor
into modern-day serfs and abandoned whole segments of the society.
Government no longer makes any attempt to ameliorate racial and economic
inequality. Instead, it criminalizes poverty. It has turned the poor into
one more cash crop for the rich.
"By conceptualizing the problem of policing as one of inadequate training
and professionalization, reformers fail to directly address how the very
nature of policing and the legal system served to maintain and exacerbate
racial inequality," Vitale writes. "By calling for colorblind 'law and
order' they strengthen a system that puts people of color at a structural
disadvantage. At the root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of
the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing
inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to
directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it. .Well-trained
police following proper procedures are still going to be arresting people
for mostly low-level offenses, and the burden of that will continue to fall
primarily on communities of color because that is how the system is designed
to operate-not because of the biases or misunderstandings of officers."
In a recent interview, Vitale told me, "We've been waging a war on drugs for
40 years by putting people in prison for ever longer sentences. Yet drugs
are cheaper, easier to get, and at a higher quality than they've ever been.
Any high school student in America can get any kind of drugs they want. Yet
we persist in this idea that the way to respond to the problem of drugs, and
many other social problems, is through arrest, courts, punishments, prisons.
This is what Trump is playing to. This idea that the only appropriate role
for the state is one of coercion and threats-whether it's in the foreign
policy sphere or in the domestic sphere."
Police forces, as Vitale writes in his book, were not formed to ensure
public safety or prevent crime. They were created by the property classes to
maintain economic and political dominance and exert control over slaves, the
poor, dissidents and labor unions that challenged the wealthy's hold on
power and ability to amass personal fortunes. Many of America's policing
techniques, including widespread surveillance, were pioneered and perfected
in colonies of the U.S. and then brought back to police departments in the
homeland. Blacks in the South had to be controlled, and labor unions and
radical socialists in the industrial Northeast and Midwest had to be broken.
The fundamental role of the police has never changed. Paul Butler in his
book "Chokehold: Policing Black Men" and James Forman Jr. in his book
"Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America" echo Vitale's
point that the war on drugs "has never been about public health or public
safety. It's been about providing a cover for aggressive and invasive
policing that targets almost exclusively people of color."
"People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in
the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel," Vitale said. "They are held up as this
liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the
support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent
to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He's confronted with a dilemma.
Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either
the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic
Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is
having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when
he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill
lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, 'I
need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions
further.' He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first
attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over
the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some
crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the
occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working
classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust
in the economy, and that becomes their primary mission."
"The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was
the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905," Vitale said. "For the same reasons.
It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There
was a back and forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local
police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. . They
needed a force that was more adherent to the interest of capital. .
Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town
there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn't open fire on the strikers. So,
the state police force was created to be that strong arm for the law. Again,
the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of
workers. . It's a two-way exchange. As we're developing ideas throughout our
own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them
and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often
despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States.
There's a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of
policing that morphs into death squads and horrible human rights abuses."
The almost exclusive alliance on militarized police to deal with profound
inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such
as Chicago into miniature failed states, ones where destitute young men and
women join a gang for security and income and engage in battles with other
gangs and the police. The "broken windows" policy shifts the burden for
poverty onto the poor. It criminalizes minor infractions, arguing that
disorder produces crime and upending decades of research about the causes of
crime.
"As poverty deepens and housing prices rise, government support for
affordable housing has evaporated, leaving in its wake a combination of
homeless shelters and aggressive broken-windows-oriented policing," Vitale
writes. "As mental health facilities close, police become the first
responders to calls for assistance with mental health crises. As youth are
left without adequate schools, jobs, or recreational facilities, they form
gangs for mutual protection or participate in the black markets of stolen
goods, drugs, and sex to survive and are ruthlessly criminalized. Modern
policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer
or communities stronger, and even when it does, this is accomplished through
the most coercive forms of state power that destroy the lives of millions."
The accelerated assault on the poor and the growing omnipotence of the
police signal our transformation into an authoritarian state in which the
rich and the powerful are not subject to the rule of law. The Trump
administration will promote none of the conditions that could ameliorate
this crisis-affordable housing; well-paying jobs; safe and nurturing schools
that do not charge tuition; better mental health facilities; efficient
public transportation; the rebuilding of the nation's infrastructure;
demilitarized police forces in which most officers do not carry weapons;
universal, government-funded health care; an end to the predatory loans and
unethical practices of big banks; and reparations to African-Americans and
an end to racial segregation. Trump and most of those he has appointed to
positions of power disdain the poor as a dead weight on society. They blame
stricken populations for their own misery. They seek to subjugate the poor,
especially those of color, through police violence, ever harsher forms of
punishment and an expansion of the prison system.
"We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our
communities, but that is not what the current system is," Alexander writes
in "The New Jim Crow." "The system is better designed to create crime, and a
perpetual class of people labeled criminal. . Saying mass incarceration is
an abysmal failure makes sense, though only if one assumes that the criminal
justice system is designed to prevent and control crime. But if mass
incarceration is understood as a system of social control-specifically,
racial control-then the system is a fantastic success."
