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by Peter Kraska

It is certainly a positive development that the White House has taken such a keen interest in this problem. And the executive order appears to include some important changes — including making it more difficult to obtain that most extreme military armament available to our local police.

However, police militarization is a 25 year long trend that has only grown in momentum over time. The restrictions on militaristic gear directed by the White House while important symbolically, will certainly not substantively impact this trend in and of itself. Police militarization at this point is as much a cultural problem as it is a material one, and reversing the cultural trend toward police militarization will require more far reaching efforts.

There are signs the Obama administration understands this to some extent, given the re-emphasis that would like to place on community policing reform efforts. But we have to remain aware that the federal government attempted to steer the police institution for the last 25 years in a community policing direction; the result: police militarization.

Peter Kraska, whose books include Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police, was consulted by the White House and has testified on this same issue in front of the U.S. Senate. 

CNN is now reporting: “Obama preparing order on police militarization.”

PETER KRASKA, peter.kraska at eku.edu
Kraska is professor and chair of Graduate Studies and Research in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. He is considered a leading expert on police militarization and is author or co-author of numerous books including Essential Criminal Justice and Criminology Research Methods and The American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and Police. In recent months, he’s met at the White House and has given Congressional testimony.

He said today: “It’s positive to see the White House addressing the issue of police militarization as it relates to Ferguson but the approach that they’re they’re taking is a minor step in addressing the overall militarization trend.

“From my meeting at the White House, frankly, they — like most political players — were interested in a quick fix. They want to hear that by somehow tweaking the 1033 program (which transfers equipment from the Pentagon to local law enforcement) that they can have an impact. That program is important symbolically, but there’s an entire for-profit police militarization industry that wouldn’t be affected.

“You also have to review the Department of Homeland Security grant program which provides far more than the military. Also, far more military-style training occurs under DHS and DOD. Local law enforcement also pays for heavy military-type equipment from civil asset forfeiture funds. At the end of the day, what really needs to be addressed is a 25-year-long process of militarizing the culture of military police.

“There needs to be a focus on the demand side rather than the supply. As long as there is a high level of demand for heavy military equipment by local law enforcement, you’re not really fixing the problem.”

On Tuesday, Kraska will be speaking in Seattle on “Militarized Policing and Public Protest: From the WTO Protests to Ferguson.” It’s been 15 years since the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle.

Kraska said today: “The WTO protests were one of the first public instances of obvious police militarization. It was targeted not at low level drug dealers or struggling communities, but many middle and upper class folks in what’s considered an affluent city.”

See video of Kraska’s congressional testimony from October.

See his piece: “Militarization of U.S. Police: Ferguson, Mo.”
In it, he says: “Even though I was the first academic to identify, research, and write about these trends — even I would not have predicted the extent to which the Military Model would overtake the Community Policing reform movement so rapidly.”

AJAMU BARAKA, ajamubaraka2 at gmail.com
Baraka is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies who is based in Colombia. He just wrote the piece “Race and Militarism from Ferguson to Syria: A letter to African Americans.”

MICHAEL SHANK, michael at fcnl.org, @Michael_Shank
Shank just wrote the piece “Police Militarization Must Be Halted,” which states: “The Senate and House bills [Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Reps. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Raul Labrador (R-Idaho)] target the Pentagon’s transfer to police forces of free military-grade equipment coming back from U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. This program has gifted over $5 billion worth of recently used and unused war equipment — armored personnel carriers, tanks, Humvees, and Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected [MRAP] vehicles, grenade launchers, armed drones, and assault weapons — to U.S. police since the late 1990s when the program first started. The bicameral legislation would prohibit the transfer of these military weapons. Given that the Pentagon has 13,000 MRAPs to give away, this comes at a critical time.”

JARIBU HILL, jaribu.hill@gmail.com, @truthteller711, @blacks4peace
NETFA FREEMAN, netfa@ips-dc.org, @Netfafree

Hill and Freeman are both on the coordinating committee of the Black Alliance for Peace. Freeman is writing a forthcoming book: Community Control Over Police.    The group recently released a statement calling for an executive order to end the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which siphons military equipment to police in the U.S.

The group states: “The gratuitous militarization of police forces across the United States through this program has helped to turn these agencies into brutal weapons of repression. Therefore, nothing short of complete abolition of this program is acceptable.

“BAP has demanded abolition of the 1033 program since BAP’s 2017 founding. It now asks the public to sign a petition (available in English and Spanish) demanding the Biden administration and Democrats commit to abolishing this racist and brutal program.”

Hill is also executive director of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights. She added: “Here in the belly of the Deep South beast, we understand the harsh and irreversible effects measures like 1033 have had and continue to have on those who languish in poverty, forced to live in shanty shacks and tenements.” She formerly served as municipal judge for the city of Hollandale and is a human rights attorney and a veteran community organizer.

The group noted: “The National Defense Authorization Act of 1997 that then-Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) supported and President Bill Clinton (D) signed into law created the 1033 program by expanding on a previous program.”Responding to outrage about the heavily militarized police response to protests after Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, President Barack Obama enacted a policy in 2015 that appeared to limit the program, but made little difference in any department’s ability to acquire and use military weapons.

“Even with the scale-back, the Obama administration managed to transfer a $459 million arsenal to police agencies. …

“President Donald Trump came into office and reversed Obama’s cosmetic changes. What the Biden administration is now proposing by reversing Trump’s reversal to the Obama policy is not enough, as reverting the policy to Obama’s altered version is not justice.”

PETER KRASKA, peter.kraska[at]eku.edu
Kraska is professor and chair of Graduate Studies and Research in the School of Justice Studies Eastern Kentucky University. He is considered a leading expert on police militarization and is author or co-author of numerous books including Militarizing The American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and Police.

See his tweets about latest developments via @Peterkraska: “Steady chorus on MSM about how police reforms take time. BS. Requires putting real reforms into place. This Never happened!” “Folks talked about the Us vs. Them before Dallas. They ain’t seen nothing compared to what’s coming. I warned WH commission — deaf ears.” See interview with Kraska: “White House Commission May End Up Training More Cops to Use Military Weapons.”

MARJORIE COHN, marjorielegal[at]gmail.com, @marjoriecohn, http://marjoriecohn.com/
Cohn is professor emerita at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and editor and contributor to Drones and Targeted Killings: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.

She is quoted in the just published piece by CommonDreams.org: “Legal Experts Raise Alarm over Shocking Use of ‘Killer Robot’ in Dallas.” Says Cohn: “Police cannot use deadly force unless there’s an imminent threat of death or great bodily injury to them or other people. If the suspect was holed up in a parking garage and there was nobody in immediate danger from him, the police could have waited him out. They should have arrested him and brought him to trial.

“Due process is not just enshrined in our constitution, it’s also enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the U.S. has ratified, making it part of U.S. law. …

“The same way that the Obama administration uses unmanned drones in other countries to kill people instead of arresting them and bringing them to trial, we see a similar situation here. … As the technology develops, we’re going to see the increasing use of military weapons in the hands of the police, which is going to inflame and exacerbate a very volatile situation.”

MARSHA COLEMAN-ADEBAYO, nofearcoalition at aol.com
Marsha Coleman-Adebayo recently co-wrote “No Rights that a White Man is Bound to Respect” for Black Agenda Report. She will be speaking at a rally outside the Justice Department Wednesday afternoon “to call on the Attorney General to help secure justice for Michael Brown and the people of Ferguson, Missouri, as well as an overhaul of U.S. law enforcement tactics in order to stop police brutality and the militarization of our police forces.” For more information on the rally, see here or contact: Alli McCracken, CODEPINK national coordinator, alli at codepink.org.

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo is the author of No FEAR: A Whistleblower’s Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA. Her successful lawsuit lead to the passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act).

MICHAEL SHANK, michael at fcnl.org, @Michael_Shank
Shank just co-wrote “Stop Treating America Like a War Zone” with Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), who The Hill reports is “drafting legislation to limit a Pentagon program that provides surplus military equipment to local law enforcement.”

They write: “America is finally waking up to the militarization of its police forces. This is a good thing and heralds a tipping point in the changing face of policing in the United States. America must realize that what is happening in Ferguson, Missouri — with the overwhelming militarized response of local police forces to the protests over the shooting of an unarmed black teenager — is also bound to happen in other American cities. With outrage mounting over the crackdown in Ferguson, now is the time to act.

“Ferguson is not alone in having a militarized police force. There are countless stories of police departments getting (and later selling) assault weapons, drones and other military-grade equipment that is absolutely ill-suited for America’s main streets. The Columbia Police Department in South Carolina, for example, received a free Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicle, known as an MRAP, from the Pentagon, which otherwise would have cost Columbia nearly $700,000 (though the city is responsible for all repairs and upkeep going forward). Columbia’s interim police chief, Ruben Santiago, justified the acquisition by saying that the vehicle “will be a barrier between the public and a hostile person or situation such as a barricaded suspect with weapons who may be threatening someone’s life.”

Michael Shank is associate director for legislative affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation and adjunct faculty at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

By Peter Kraska

Even though I was the first academic to identify, research, and write about these trends — even I would not have predicted the extent to which the Military Model would overtake the Community Policing reform movement so rapidly. Community policing reforms came about as a corrective to the 1950-60s professional police model which created a large gulf between police and citizens. Few noticed that underlying all the CP rhetoric was a little noticed yet foretelling trend of para-militarism as found in SWAT teams. What we’re witnessing today, though, with the influence of the Dept. of Homeland Security since 9/11 — along with growing emphasis on military hardware and tactics — is the expansion of police militarization throughout entire police departments — and indeed, the entire police institution.

This expansion is having a dramatic impact on how the police perceive the public (more as enemy combatants than citizens of the community they are serving) as well as how the public perceives the police (more as an occupying force that cares only about maintaining law and order through military style tactics, hardware, and appearance). This dynamic can readily lend itself to the police using deadly force inappropriately, and to the public reacting to these incidents with outrage and complete distrust of what they perceive as an occupying force that does not have their best interest in mind. In short, the police lose all legitimacy in the eyes of the people they are serving — which only reinforces a we vs. they mentality among the police. This has been the danger inherent in this well-documented trend toward police militarization; this is the ugly reality that is playing out in Ferguson, Missouri.

KERRY McLEAN, kerrymclean@gmail.com
McLean is an international human rights lawyer and the spokesperson for the Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence, which just released their extensive report [PDF].

The commission was set up by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, National Conference of Black Lawyers, and National Lawyers Guild “to examine whether widespread and systematic racist violence in policing against people of African descent” in the U.S. constitutes violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The report finds “a pattern and practice of racist police violence in the U.S. in the context of a history of oppression dating back to the extermination of First Nations peoples, the enslavement of Africans, the militarization of U.S. society, and the continued perpetuation of structural racism.”

These conclusions were drawn by twelve Commissioners — judges, lawyers, professors and experts from Pakistan, South Africa, Barbados, Japan, India, Nigeria, France, Costa Rica, Antigua and Barbuda, the United Kingdom, and Jamaica — who held public hearings from January 18 to February 6, 2021.

The Commissioners “find violations of the rights to: life, security, freedom from torture, freedom from discrimination, mental health, access to remedies for violations, fair trial and presumption of innocence, and to be treated with humanity and respect. … The Commissioners find that U.S. laws and police practices do not comply with the international standards on the use of force, which require legal basis, legitimate objective, necessity, precautions, proportionality, protection of life, non-discrimination, and accountability. …

“Many Black people are killed in broad daylight to intimidate communities and because officers don’t fear accountability.”

TREVOR TIMM, trevor at freedom.press, @trevortimm
Executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, Timm tweeted a string of links to videos of police attacking journalists, writing: “Police are purposefully targeting reporters all over the country, in video after video. There’s no other way to describe it.”
Another tweet reads: “This might be the worst one yet. Journalist complies with order to get down, while making it known he’s press. While he is on the ground defenseless, a cop pepper sprays him at point blank range.”

Timm is a columnist for GEN magazine. In response to a Twitter thread about a series of videos showing a pattern of police violence against protesters from a fellow columnist, he tweeted: “I’ve been watching cable news for the last two hours, it is completely devoid of this reality. It’s been almost all about random looters, virtually zero coverage of the dozens of truly disturbing videos of cops brutalizing civilians for no reason.”

Timm has done extensive work on drones and notes that a Predator Drone launched from Grand Forks Air Force Base was deployed over the Minneapolis protests.

See past accuracy.org news releases on the militarization of the police.

HuffingtonPost reports: “A Grand Jury Did Indict One Person Involved In Eric Garner’s Killing — The Man Who Filmed It.” (See more, at bottom.)

GLEN FORD, glen.ford at blackagendareport.com, @GlenFordBAR
Executive editor of Black Agenda Report, Ford just wrote the piece “The New Movement: Are We There Yet?”

MATTHEW FOGG, matthew.fogg at leap.cc, @marshalfogg
Fogg is a retired Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal and has recently returned to D.C. from Ferguson. He won the largest ever ($4 million) employee Title VII discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice. His book, Bigots with Badges (the same as a 1997 New York Post front page headline depicting his story) is forthcoming. He recently appeared on the panel “Police Body Cameras and Recording Misconduct” at the Cato Institute. See video on C-Span.org. He has been participating in protests in D.C. organized by the Hands Up CoalitionDC. Protests are continuing in front of the Department of Justice.

He said today: “Body cams or not, the problem you have to deal with is that the system is so systemically racially biased in its nature. America saw Eric Garner get choked to death on televised video just like we saw Rodney King get viciously beaten on video in our living rooms and still all the police misconduct was later justified. As a highly decorated veteran law officer, I knew the system culture would back me up, to include police, prosecutors and judges if my suspects were black but, if they were white, I was more concerned with that same system challenging my decisions and seeking out wrongdoing on my behalf.”

SHAHID BUTTAR, media at bordc.org, @bordc
Executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Buttar said today: “The movement to end police murder with impunity is not asking for solutions. It is demanding them, and the president’s body camera proposal does not even begin to answer the call. We will continue to see seemingly spontaneous mass demonstrations all across the country going forward, because the evasion of justice by the murderers of Eric Garner proves what Americans of color have long known: police can get away with anything, even murdering someone, in broad daylight, on videotape, without provocation, using illegal force methods. This movement will stop at nothing less than the end of police brutality, profiling, militarization, and mass incarceration.”

CARLOS MILLER, carlosmiller at pinac.org
Miller founded the website PhotographyIsNotACrime.com and is author of the just-released book The Citizen Journalist Photography Handbook. He said today: “I started my blog in 2007 after I was arrested for photographing cops on a journalistic assignment. My goal was to document my trial but when the State Attorney’s Office realized I had started a blog, they kept prolonging the trial in the hopes I would stop.

“During that time, people equipped with their new iPhones were finding themselves in positions where they could record police abuse, only they would be told it was illegal. So they came across my blog during their research because at that time, there was not a whole lot of information out there.

“My initial goal was for the blog to be temporary until I won my trial but it became a clearinghouse for these types of stories because the mainstream media wasn’t covering them.

“I’ve been arrested three times while filming police — the last time was when the police dispersed Occupy Miami. I tell people: you have to be so clean because they’ll find a way to come after you — it’s like a ‘Blue Mafia.’ They all stick together and will find any pretext to come after someone.”

Miller’s recent pieces include “NYPD Pays $55,000 to Arrested Videographer as Failed Twitter Campaign Continues to Expose Abuse” and “No Indictment for NYPD Cop Killing Man in Chokehold in Viral Video.”

The Huffington Post piece cited atop this news release notes: “On Wednesday, a Staten Island grand jury decided not to return an indictment for the police officer who put Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, in a chokehold shortly before his death. A different Staten Island grand jury was less sympathetic to Ramsey Orta, however, the man who filmed the entire incident.

“In August, less than a month after filming the fatal July 17 encounter in which Daniel Pantaleo and other NYPD police officers confronted Garner for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, a grand jury indicted Orta on weapons charges stemming from an arrest by undercover officers earlier that month.”

Reuters reported “At some point during his arrest, Orta told officers, ‘You’re just mad because I filmed your boy,’ an NYPD spokeswoman said.” CBSNewYork reported: “Orta’s mother, Emily Mercado, said police have been following her son ever since he recorded Garner’s arrest.” The report quotes his wife, Chrissie Ortiz, stating: “The day after they declare it a homicide, you find someone next to him with a gun, and you saw him pass it off? Out in public when he knows he’s in the public spotlight? It makes no sense.”

Also, see: “Tracking Journalist Arrests at Occupy Protests Around the Country.”