DownWithTyranny!: What Is Congress Going To Do About Police Militarization?

Militarization of local police forces began in earnest in 1991 when George H.W. Bush decided it was a good way to reward GOP Military Industrial Complex donors while fighting the so-called War on Drugs. Since then more than $5 billion worth of military equipment has been given to local police forces around the country. Along with the equipment has come an attitude of occupiers in an alien land where anything that moves could be the enemy-- especially if what's moving is a young minority male.

As we've mentioned, last June Alan Grayson proposed an amendment to the Defense Department Appropriations Act that was opposed by both Boehner and Pelosi. It failed 62-355, just 19 Republicans and 43 Democrats having the wisdom and guts to stand up to their respective party leaderships. Team Boehner and every Republican leader-- including Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Greg Walden, Darrell Issa and Paul Ryan-- joined every Democratic House leader-- Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chris Van Hollen, Xavier Becerra, Joe Crowley and, of course, Steve Israel-- to oppose Grayson's amendment to "to prohibit use of funds to make aircraft (including unmanned aerial vehicles), armored vehicles, grenade launchers, silencers, toxocological agents (including chemical agents, biological agents, associated equipment), launch vehicles, guided missiles, ballistic missiles, rockets, torpedoes, bombs, mines or nuclear weapons available to local law enforcement agencies."

Boehner tasked hereditary New Jersey corporate shill Rodney Procter Frelinghuysen IV with trying to bury Grayson's proposal in parliamentary procedure. Grayson changed the wording slightly and got by Frelinghuysen's idiotic objections. The amendment voted on was "to prohibit use of funds to transfer aircraft (including unmanned aerial vehicles), armored vehicles, grenade launchers, silencers, toxicological agents, launch vehicles, guided missiles, ballistic missiles, rockets, torpedoes, bombs, mines, or nuclear weapons through the DOD Excess Personal Property Program established pursuant to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997." That's what failed with only 62 votes. Pelosi is having second thoughts. After the police overreaction in Ferguson last week, her office released a statement saying that the events there "show need for greater oversight and guidance… The Leader supports examining the overall federal effort of giving military-type equipment to local police departments. Cutting off all funding-- like the Grayson amendment-- is a blunt instrument, but oversight and appropriate scale of funding for such programs need to be examined.”

Grayson mentioned in a tweet yesterday that "pigs feeding at the military-industrial trough killed" this amendment, a view that is widely accepted Inside-the-Beltway, albeit only in whispers. It helps further the case that current House leaders like Hoyer, Wasserman Schultz, Israel, Crowley, et al have got to go if the Democratic Party is to reestablish itself as the people's party and not just one of two establishment fronts for the wealthy and powerful-- and corrupt.

Hank Johnson (D-GA), Bobby Scott (D-VA) and John Conyers (D-MI), all of whom backed Grayson's amendment in June, plus Steve Cohen (D-TN), who did not are calling for Congress to take the matter up again. They're reacting to news reports like this one in New York magazine about "chest-out, guns-up posturing small-time police departments across the country."

Army fatigues, armored vehicles, tear gas, AR-15s-- it’s the war-ready imagery not just of Gaza and Iraq but Ferguson, Missouri, a town of 21,000 with zero murders on the books in 2014. Unless, of course, you count 18-year-old Michael Brown.

…What transpired in the streets appeared to be a kind a municipal version of shock and awe; the first wave of flash grenades and tear gas had played as a prelude to the appearance of an unusually large armored vehicle, carrying a military-style rifle mounted on a tripod. The message of all of this was something beyond the mere maintenance of law and order: it’s difficult to imagine how armored officers with what looked like a mobile military sniper’s nest could quell the anxieties of a community outraged by allegations regarding the excessive use of force. It revealed itself as a raw matter of public intimidation.

The instruments of that intimidation have been funneled to local police beginning with the drug war, as laid out by journalist Radley Balko in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop, and a Cato Institute paper on the subject from 2006:

Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers.

…Writing for the Daily Beast, a military veteran argued, “The net effect is a Ferguson police department in name only. In terms of its equipment, organization, and deployment methods, the Ferguson force looks more like an infantry or military police company in Iraq … this military gear transforms the police department into an occupying army, and enables the police to act with such speed and violence so as to destroy any meaningful right to peaceably assemble or address grievances towards government.”

Balkey put it this way in a Reddit AMA before Ferguson: “I think that as bad as the weapons and tactics are, the uniforms might be more pernicious, at least in terms of fostering a militaristic mindset.”

“When you dress like a soldier,” he wrote, “you're predisposing yourself to start thinking like one. And of course, there’s really no strategic value, unless you’re raiding a forest.”