Cops, American Style

On Monday morning (6/8), I was watching a local newscast. Attorney General William Barr was being interviewed about the use of rubber bullets and chemical gas on the peaceful and lawful Lafayette Park protesters to clear a path for the President to walk over to St John’s Episcopal Church. What surprised me is Barr’s statement, with a straight face, that “pepper spray not a chemical,” rather simply natural pepper. I believe arsenic and cyanide also are found in nature, but concentrations of pepper gas are exceptionally painful, particularly when it gets into your eyes. I can attest having stupidly touched my eyes after eating some hot chilis… which were clearly mild compared with a direct blast of concentrated spray directly into someone’s eyes.

Should it matter that using such crowd-controlling tear gas and pepper spray, which induces severe tearing, coughing, and gagging, facilitates the transmission of the coronavirus? Is it relevant to ask what harm a highly inaccurate “rubber” bullet – tumbling end over end after being fired – might do to a human body? “As protests have taken over the U.S., police officers in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Kansas City, Chicago, and more have opened fire on crowds—bruising, maiming, and even permanently blinding peaceful demonstrators and members of the press. The shots fired have primarily been with what are colloquially called rubber bullets.

“The name is a bit of a misnomer. These kinetic energy (KE) rounds are rarely made of rubber these days, and some even have metal components, just like conventional bullets. Most are actually shot from grenade launchers, though shotgun rounds are also popular, and rounds are even made for rifles and pistols. Instead of piercing the skin, the rounds are meant to strike someone with blunt force, incapacitating them like the swing of a baton but from afar.

“More than a century in the making, rubber bullets can cause serious injury, and even kill, and it’s taken time for the semantics to catch up. Once called nonlethal weapons, research has demonstrated their dangers, like that up to 15% of people struck with KE rounds are left with a permanent disability. They were renamed ‘less-than-lethal’ for a while in the early aughts, and now much of the world, including the UN, calls them by a more suitable title: ‘less lethal’ rounds.” FastCompany.com, June 5th.

How about the “us” versus “them” great divide between police and their community, amplified by the adoption of military equipment, uniforms and tactics – including armored vehicles used rather indiscriminately even for mundane police efforts? Where did this come from? “In 2014, the ACLU reported that police departments in Arizona had collectively amassed a military arsenal that included: 712 rifles, 64 armored vehicles, 42 forced-entry tools, 32 bomb suits, 704 night-vision items, 830 units of surveillance equipment, and, in at least one department, ‘a .50 caliber machine gun that shoots bullets powerful enough to blast through the buildings on multiple city blocks.’

“This magnitude of military-grade weaponry stock is not an anomaly. Across the country, more than 8,000 police departments have been able to gather such military equipment with ease, and at no cost, through the 1033 Program, which allows the military to pass hand-me-down combat equipment to local law enforcement agencies. Once received, the government requires any sent equipment to be used in communities within a year, and this deployment has become one of the prime contributors to the militarization of local police…

“Originally known as the 1208 Program, it was created in 1990 for two specific reasons: to eliminate military surplus waste following the Cold War, and to assist in the hardline federal ‘war on drugs’ program (along with the secretary of defense, the attorney general and the director of National Drug Control Policy had to agree that the equipment was necessary). But in 1996, under the National Defense Authorization Act, President Clinton signed into law the expanded 1033 Program, which scrapped the counter-drug stipulation, and allowed ‘all law enforcement agencies to acquire property for . . . purposes that assist in their arrest and apprehension mission.’…

“In 2015, in the wake of the death of Michael Brown and the following protests in Ferguson, President Obama issued an executive order to cut back the 1033 program. Specifically, the order took back highly militarized gear from departments, including vehicles, bayonets, and grenade launchers. According to Kenneth Lowande, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan, the order was effective, and the federal government recalled a lot of that equipment within six months from the 300 departments that stocked it. The Pentagon reported the return of items included 126 vehicles, 138 grenade launchers, and 1,623 bayonets, according to The New York Times.

“But, in 2017, in a move spearheaded by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration reversed the Obama order. ‘It sends the message that we care more about public safety than about how a piece of equipment looks, especially when that equipment has been shown to reduce crime, reduce complaints against and assaults on police, and makes officers more effective,’ the Justice Department wrote in a background paper on the decision.” FastCompany.com, June 8th. Hey, don’t forget to turn off that bodycam before you do anything that you might not want the public to see!

I keep repeating the following statistic, because it shows us how misdirected our criminal justice system has become: for a nation with just over 4% of the world’s population, we house a quarter of the earth’s inmates… more per capita than any other country. The proclivity to jail people for more offences and for longer sentences is a relatively recent American phenomenon. “The prison population began to grow in the 1970s, when politicians from both parties used fear and thinly veiled racial rhetoric to push increasingly punitive policies. Nixon started this trend, declaring a “war on drugs” and justifying it with speeches about being ‘tough on crime. But the prison population truly exploded during President Ronald Reagan’s administration. When Reagan took office in 1980, the total prison population was 329,000, and when he left office eight years later, the prison population had essentially doubled, to 627,000. This staggering rise in incarceration hit communities of color hardest: They were disproportionately incarcerated then and remain so today.

“Incarceration grew both at the federal and state level, but most of the growth was in the states, which house the vast majority of the nation’s prisoners. The number of prisoners grew in every state — blue, red, urban, and rural. In Texas, for example, the state incarceration rate quadrupled: In 1978, the state incarcerated 182 people for every 100,000 residents. By 2003, that figure was 710…

“Simply put, other countries do not use prison as a one-size-fits-all solution to crime. In 2016, the Brennan Center examined convictions and sentences for the 1.46 million people behind bars nationally and found that fully 39 percent, or 576,000, were in prison without any public safety reason and could have been punished in a less costly and damaging way (such as community service).” The History of Mass Incarceration, a Brennan Center for Justice report, July 20, 2018.

What the terrifying images addressing peaceful protesters (vs looters and arsonists), brutality on steroids showing repeated police over-kill, did for some major police departments… was give rise to a call to defund police forces now seen as having lost touch with the communities they serve. Here is what has just begun to happen in some of our largest cities (from FastCompany.com):
Minneapolis: Nine members of the City Council—reportedly a veto-proof majority—pledged to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a community-oriented model based on public safety. 

New York City: Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to shift some funds away from the bloated NYPD and into things such as youth services and social services. Although de Blasio’s statements lacked specifics, they marked the first time he said he would cut funding to America’s largest police department, which has a budget of $6 billion. According to The New York Times, the mayor said the details would be hashed out before the city’s budget deadline of July 1, which is fast approaching. 

Los Angeles: Mayor Eric Garcetti announced he would divert $150 million from the Los Angeles Police Department toward services such as youth employment and health. While it’s a small sliver of the LAPD’s overall budget, it’s a significant gesture in a city that, as the Los Angeles Times reports, saw expanding its police force as “gospel” up until recently. 

Chicago: Rossana Rodríguez Sanchez, an alderman for the Chicago’s 33rd ward, has expressed support for defunding the police, calling it a “great tool to rethink our ideas of what public safety should look like.”

Let’s be clear on wording: “defund” or “dismantle” the police are currently words of anger. Democratic Presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has rejected that overall vector. Since we dismantled our mental health institutions in the 1980s (the Reagan “law and order, get tough on crime” era), we have given police a host of our social problems, dressed cops up and equipped them as a military assault force, and basically asked them to solve not just criminal activities… but whatever no other government body is willing to handle. We’ve added pages and pages to criminal activity… and told them to “go solve it all.” We did this to ourselves. It can’t be about “defunding,” but about reallocating funding and responsibility. Redefining their role. And yes, we need to demilitarize cops, make them one with their community and hold each police officer to a higher, more responsible plane… laced with common sense. Racism must, however, die. Where do we start?

At a federal level and on June 8th, Democrats introduced legislation in the House to curb local police abuse, track repeat offenders and store responsibility against officers who seriously and repeatedly cross the line. “‘Never again should the world be subjected to witnessing what we saw on the streets in Minneapolis, the slow murder of an individual by a uniformed police officer,’ said Congressional Black Caucus chair Karen Bass.

“House Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler, and senators Cory Booker (N.J.) and Kamala Harris (Calif.) joined Bass in introducing the legislation… The Justice in Policing Act of 2020 aims to reduce the legal protection of officers accused of misconduct, as well as introduce restrictions preventing law enforcement from employing lethal force as anything but a last resort. The Justice Department’s power to investigate department-wide practices and prosecute misconduct would also be expanded. The proposed measures would also ban chokeholds, establish a national database of police misconduct, prohibit certain no-knock warrants, limit the transfer of military-grade equipment to state and local authorities, and make lynching a federal crime. Many of these proposals have been sought by civil rights activists for decades.” Variety.com, June 8th. The chances of that bill passing through the Republican Senate and being signed into law by the President: none. But change is coming… November will tell… if we still have an election.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if those who are dedicated to throttling constitutional rights under the guise of protecting America understand how close we all are to losing this country entirely.