It’s been proven that Driving While Black can get African Americans disproportionately stopped, searched, violated, maybe even killed, for no reason. But it is more appropriate to say that Living While Black, particularly for African American men, is dangerous in America. When blacks are portrayed as a criminal race, it’s easy for those walking unmolested to the store with their white privilege to maintain that’s the way it should be.
So I contemplate this on the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral and riots in the street. A young Baltimore man who came in the crosshairs of the police, fled for his life, and was arrested and mysteriously injured in police custody — an injury that resulted in death a week later. And I’d like to be startled, shocked and amazed at this tragedy, but unfortunately I’m not. This has become business as usual for the Baltimore Police Department. Ask the family of Anthony Anderson, killed by the police on the way to a birthday party. I would like to be outraged at the useless loss of life, but then, there have been so many who have lost their lives for no particular reason by the hands of the police all across the country.
So I become very sober about the matter and remember Michelle Alexander who wrote about the militarization of the police force in her book The New Jim Crow. I actually saw her speak right after the Gray incident at Goucher College here in Baltimore. In a frontline interview, Alexander stated that after the media blitz about a crack cocaine epidemic in the Reagan era, police forces across the country became militarized. People were told that crack created this Robo-criminal of Schwatzenager proportions, unmanageable by the likes of mere mortal armed police. In response to that Alexander says, “… the Pentagon began giving tanks and military equipment to local law enforcement to wage this war.”
That would explain why an article in the Capital Journal stated:
The weapons that destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq have made their way to local law enforcement. While police forces across the country began a process of militarization — complete with SWAT teams and flash-bang grenades — when President Reagan intensified the “war on drugs,” the post-9/11 “war on terror” has added fuel to the fire.
The New York Times in an article by Matt Apuzzo updated this. It said that in the Obama era, “police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.”
So when we look at the deaths of unarmed black men by white police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, New York and Baltimore understanding militarization, the police begin to come into the crosshairs of our utter amazement and disbelief. The nonsensical unspeakable begin to “make sense.” (Not really.) But let’s just say they do.
The world is in an uproar about these much-publicized Trayvon deaths that split the country apart. But what gets little publicity are the SWAT police raids that terrorize poor communities who fear the local police far more than they do al qaida.
As it turns out, the American Civil Liberties Union published a 100-page report entitled, “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.” They concluded that this police militarization, “unfairly impacts people of color and undermines individual liberties, and it has been allowed to happen in the absence of any meaningful public discussion.”
They also stated that SWAT teams were mostly unnecessary to issue drug warrants to people who are merely suspected of a crime. However, SWAT teams who use military tactics to break down doors and start shooting create tragedies that don’t make national attention.
The report cites cases. In 2008 when the hyper-police suspected Anthony Terry of drug dealing in Lima, Ohio a SWAT team broke down Tarika Wilson’s door and opened fire. hey killed 26-year-old Wilson, the girlfriend of Terry, and injured her one-year-old baby in the melee. The officer who murdered Wilson was found not guilty on all charges.
Speaking of collateral damage, after seeing kids’ toys in the front yard, a Wisconsin SWAT team with assault rifles barged into the home of the Phonesavanh family and threw a flash-bang grenade. The person they were charging wasn’t even in the house. That didn’t stop the grenade from landing in the crib of a 19-month-old child.
This all starts to come together when we realize that combat-trained military are coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq to police our streets. They bring with them all the trauma of war and while heavily armed, work out their stress on the red, white and blue streets of America.
Tim Dees, a retired cop and criminal justice professor said, “In my experience, about half” policemen are military and “many are still active in the reserves or National Guard.” There are no hard statistics on this, however the International Association of Chiefs of Police has found it necessary to publish a guidebook outlining “transitional obstacles” that veterans might face when the target is no longer al qaida, but, well…Walter Scott, shot eight times in the back, or Michael Brown, death by chokehold, or Freddie Gray, death by suspicion.
Oh, I’m not surprised and very sober about Freddie Gray. I understand. I think it is appropriate to quote from a very astute source, Pogo, the cartoon character who said, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.”
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate