The terrible dynamic unleashed against prisoners of social control has expanded into the normal apparatuses and uses of policing itself. There are now, for example, approximately 600,000 police officers and 1.5 million private security guards in the United States. Increasingly, however, black and poor communities are being ìpolicedì by special paramilitary units, often called SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams. The U.S. has more than 30,000 such heavily armed, military trained police units. SWAT-team mobilizations, or ìcall outs,ì increased 400 percent between 1980 and 1995. These trends reveal the makings of what may constitute a ìNational Security Stateì ì the exercising of state power without democratic controls, checks and balances, a state where policing is employed to carry out the disfranchisement of its own citizens.
The terrible dynamic unleashed against prisoners of social control has expanded into the normal appar…
Manning Marable
Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is co-founder of the Black Radical Congress, a national network of African-American activists. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Black Leadership (NY: Columbia Univ. Press. 1998).