Pfc. Sandoval, Seth Auberon, Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Roqayah Chamseddine, Alexandra Valiente (Libya360); Mitch Jeserich (L&P, KPFA, Berkeley)
- AUDIO: Rand Paul at today's Hearing on Police Militarization U.S.; interview with the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop (Pacifica Radio, 9-9-14)
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| "As abroad so at home" - U.S. war crimes. |
Thanks to the Todo Poder al Pueblo Collective ("All Power to the Public") for sharing this article. In the wake of the recent murder by police of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the latest intensification of genocide committed against the Palestinian people by Israel with full U.S. media and military-backing, it’s important to understand the militarization of police and the joint training of police forces by Israel and the U.S.
What happens abroad is happening here. Even if people don't care about Gaza and Palestine -- or have any problem with Israel's unindicted war crimes, crimes against humanity, and its weapons manufacturing and worldwide weapons sales -- they might care about themselves here.
Police chiefs around the U.S. are flown by Israel to Israel for training (see below), to show how mass arrests and peaceful protests are suppressed or made violent and cracked down on as "riots" by paramilitary police.
Police chiefs around the U.S. are flown by Israel to Israel for training (see below), to show how mass arrests and peaceful protests are suppressed or made violent and cracked down on as "riots" by paramilitary police.
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| Just doing my job, same job I had in Iraq/Afghanistan. We're gonna show U.S. protesters. |
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The El Enemigo Común ("Common Enemy") Collective believe that it’s important to find out about possible ways of resisting militarized police attacks.
The author speaks of the Black Panther’s Ten Point Program regarding the right to self-defense against police brutality. It’s highly relevant to note the successful resistance against the very first attack by a SWAT team in the U.S., which was unleashed against the Black Panther Office in Los Angeles on December 8, 1969.
The whole idea of a formal SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) force was the brainchild of LAPD Chief Bill Gates overreacting to the "Watts Riots," an large scale uprising by people tired of police racism and abuse and other social injustices.
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| "If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people [Palestinians, American protesters, or anyone else who speaks out] who are being oppressed and loving the people who doing the oppressing" - Malcolm X |
Unlike the police attack on the Chicago Panthers four days earlier, when Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered in cold blood, nobody was killed in the six-hour gun battle between Panthers and the LAPD SWAT team in Los Angeles. Why not? It was because Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt showed the LA Panthers how to fortify their headquarters and set up defensive positions.
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| We Want Freedom (amazon) |
The arming of U.S. police agencies with military-grade weaponry and tactics can be traced back, at the very least, to the creation of the paramilitary “Special Weapons and Tactics” Unit (SWAT) in 1967.
In Overkill: Rise of Paramilitary Policing, journalist Radley Balko notes that what inspired the heavily militarized SWAT team of today was “a specialized force in Delano, California, made up of crowd control officers, riot police, and snipers, assembled to counter the farm worker uprisings led by Cesar Chavez.”
The militarization of police agencies from Ferguson to the Middle East
Ms. Roqayah Chamseddine (@roqchams) is a Sydney-based Lebanese-American journalist and commentator. She writes "Letters From the Underground" (9-4-14 in FASCISM)
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| Let's wait for them here; they love this cr-p, and we can grab a bite, too. Everyone agree? |
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| Let's lynch the "undesirables" |
After the murder of Michael Brown, protests began to quickly take shape in Ferguson in response, not only at the scene of the crime but in front of the Ferguson Police Department headquarters.
The police overreaction to these protesters, many of whom literally had their hands raised above their heads while shouting “Don’t shoot!” was alarming -- dogs were called, and heavily armed police officers lined up, intimidating the men, women, and children of Ferguson.
At least one police officer was recorded shouting, “Bring it, all you f-cking animals! Bring it!” Extremely troubling was the implementation of a no-fly zone over Ferguson, meant “to stop media from flying over the area to film.”
U.S. Prison-Industrial Complex
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| Berlin Wall, Israeli-occupied Palestine, Beirut? No, it's an American prison-industrial complex |
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| I'll gladly shoot any |
It has long colored every aspect of life for even those indirectly impacted by police actions -- when systematic racism meets a militarized police force the outcome is continued dehumanization of Black bodies, societal acceptance of black deaths at the hands of the police, and a disastrous escalation (oftentimes with public approval) of violent tactics against the Black people and communities of color.
Modern U.S. police departments share a colonial history that gives context to police violence of today -- recognizing this framework is essential when examining how police brutality has developed historically.
From constables in the 1600s, who made up a sort of “neighborhood watch,” wherein they would capture slaves and prevent them from organizing for payment, the slave patrols of the early 1700s, the brazen appointment of police officers by way of their political affiliations in the 1880’s and stop-and-frisk, adopted from English common law, we learn that not only is violence an inherent part of the institution itself but it is a necessary component which allows for the state to control its citizens, and it has emerged and developed in the most destructive of ways.
Police officers are trained to use force and are given the most lethal of weapons in order for them to do so and, according to data presented in the June 2014 report by the ACLU, this violence is overwhelmingly directed towards people of color.
“Sixty-one percent of all the people impacted by SWAT raids in drug cases were minorities” and a majority are Black:
“[W]hen the data was examined by agency (and with local population taken into consideration), racial disparities in SWAT deployments were extreme. As shown in the table and graph below, in every agency, Blacks were disproportionately more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites, sometimes substantially so. For example, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Blacks were nearly 24 times more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites were, and in Huntington, West Virginia, Blacks were 37 times more likely. Further, in Ogden, Utah, Blacks were 40 times more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites were.”
Despite this, the focus on the actions of individual officers, while warranted, should not overwhelm the discourse – the data presented by the ACLU is not only an indictment of police officers alone but of the police institution itself. Police agencies have created an environment which not only employs violence against minorities but encourages violence against them. More
What does Israel have to do with it?
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| Should the U.S. continue to fund, arm, support, and encourage Israeli crimes in Palestine? |
Present-day U.S. law enforcement as an institution has cooperated with a long list of state agencies, which are integral components of the larger machinery of government as well as international police forces.
The joint training between the United States and Israel is one such example.
In May 2010, 50 retired U.S. admirals and generals vigorously argued that Israel is a security asset in a letter to Pres. Obama:
“American police and law enforcement officials have reaped the benefit of close cooperation with Israeli professionals in the areas of domestic counter-terrorism practices and first response to terrorist attacks,” they wrote in part.
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| How long have you been working for the Company? - Which one? Oh, you mean the Company. Yeah, long time. Netanyahu gov't knew teens were dead as it whipped up racist frenzy and Israel's call for pre-planned war. |
In 2010, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) publicized that it had sponsored 15 senior law enforcement officials -- including from the FBI, NYPD, and Boston Police -- to take part in an intensive “counter-terrorism training mission” in Israel so that they could share “information, strategies and tactics,” then again in 2011 and 2013.
This program, which was first established in 2003, has sent over 115 state, federal and local law enforcement executives to Israel.
In 2013, members of a U.S. bomb squad from Arizona, including a U.S. deputy, traveled to Israel for training which included “going to a West Bank outpost with the Israeli National Police bomb squad...learning about port inspections as they relate to counter explosives and counter IED operations.”
One of the reasons for this training? “To improve techniques and tactics they use along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
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| U.S.-trained stooge of the MIC, B. Netanyahu |
According to the pamphlet not only have the U.S. Capitol Police undergone training in “Israeli counter-terrorism techniques” but the partnership between these two colonial entities is far reaching, even beyond the scope of traditional law enforcement, with FEMA and the National Guard “often [traveling] to Israel to participate in Israeli homeland security drills.”
The United States is not only learning from the brutality of the Israeli occupation forces but sharing their knowledge with other nations.
The Middle Eastern Law Enforcement Training Center, which is co-sponsored by the FBI and the U.A.E. at the Dubai Police Academy, where FBI agents offer special training courses that “[involve] many aspects of law enforcement, including ways to combat white-collar crime, violent crime, forensics and counter-terrorism.”
The United States also conducts military exchange programs in places like Egypt where U.S. forces and Egyptian forces take part in joint military exercises, and offers FBI training to Egypt’s secret police, who “routinely tortured detainees and suppressed political opposition” according to victim testimony.
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| Pro-Jewish, Anti-Zionist: International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (ijsn.net) |
Black men and women have long fought, with their blood, for the decentralization and democratization of the police and the right of their communities to determine their future without threat of police brutality – the Black Panther’s Ten Point Program, written in 1966, is a clear-cut example.
“We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People,” the program reads in part. “We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality.” An article in the Palm Beach Post, published in 1969, reads “Decentralized Police Sought by Black Panthers”:
“Six intense Black Panthers have come in out of the West as advance men for a national conference which will drumbeat a simplistic theme -- decentralize the police systems of big cities, place the cops under neighborhood control and give each community its own police commissioner.”
U.S. police forces uphold white supremacy with their racist implementation of violence, where in places like Ogden, Utah, Black people “were 40 times more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites were,” according to the ACLU.
These forces work towards the preservation of capitalism, and the police, as an institution, use elitism, violence, and authoritarianism in order to preserve the state.
Decentralization is not only possible but proving to be a necessary process in order to dismantle the structural and militarized brutality that communities of color face at the hands of racist paramilitary police forces.
The police have proven that they are not accountable to the communities they allegedly “serve and protect,” and so in order to implement restorative justice the institution itself should be dismantled and replaced with an organization that is transparent, represents the diversity of these communities and which, most importantly, is limited in regards to the scope of the organization’s power.
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