Militarized Cops Are Your Enemy (Script & Sources)

Good morning, bad news: the United States is being occupied by a domestic military force with no external oversight, no accountability and effectively no limits on their budget. So-called law enforcement organizations have long since outgrown any form of traditional policing, and now unambiguously exist to maintain political power and protect the wealthy. We’re going to talk about how the police are effectively an occupying military force actively looting the United States.

Policing in the US has gone through countless iterations in different political eras with different goals and methods. Before the 2000s, during the “community-policing era” that followed the Civil Rights Movement, law enforcement refocused on developing relationships within communities to address the problems facing those communities. But if you’re under the age of 30, that doesn’t seem like what cops do when they criminalize the unhoused, run over protestors, or kill unarmed POC for minor or imagined crimes.

It doesn’t seem like what cops do because the community-policing era ended on 9/11. In the aftermath of the Patriot Act and the newly created Department of Homeland Security, law enforcement began to transition to a sort of domestic counter-terrorist organization, shifting from working within their communities to protect them, and instead redefining themselves as an occupying force in neighborhoods that they treat like active combat zones.

Now, there are 4 big reasons why this transition has been so aggressive. The first is “qualified immunity” —  which comes from a Supreme Court ruling in 1967, when a group of priests were arrested, some of them Black, for eating lunch in a coffee shop. But when the facts of the case actually came in, and it was blatantly obvious that the cop was wrong, the judge who found them guilty was wrong, and the statute they were arrested under itself was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled that none of those facts mattered. Cops and judges were immune from civil prosecution unless they *knowingly* violated the law. And that burden of proof is pretty damn high. So, with few caveats, police can pretty much do whatever they want without facing legal consequences, and as we’ve seen in the last year, it basically takes murder captured in 4K and the biggest civil rights protests in US history to overcome that basic hurdle.

The second reason police are able to act with impunity is because, as it turns out, the most fundamental thing that they’re supposed to do — protect law abiding citizens from harm — is actually not in the job description. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Castle Rock v. Gonzales that police do not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm. Cops do not have any obligation to protect you.

The third piece of the puzzle is police unions, and while we are in support of unions against all-powerful corporate employers, in this case, as public servants, police unions oppose accountability from their employers: YOU, the public. The problem here is when local governments try to make even minor changes towards increasing police accountability, the police in those communities use their legally granted discretion and immunity to target and punish the politicians that promote those policies. For example, in Minneapolis the city council redirected 5% of the $180 million dollar police budget to pay for nonviolent crime prevention programs and mental health crisis teams. In response, the fully staffed police department stopped responding to 911 calls, specifically in a single councilmember’s district who had pushed for the budget change. It’s actually insane when you realize that modern police unions are literally operating a mafia-like protection racket. “If you don’t give us the money we demand, we won’t show up when you’re in an emergency”.

It’s hard to understate how powerful and ruthless police unions are, and how the culture of those unions exists solely to protect officers accused of brutality, corruption, discrimination, and violence, while simultaneously draining their cities’ budgets so they can buy or acquire military equipment to better subjugate their communities when those communities rise up against them in protest.

And that’s the fourth and final piece of the puzzle — because on top of all the legal, political, and cultural power that police have in the United States, they’ve also spent the last 30 years transitioning from beat cops with nightsticks and Crown Vics to fully militarized assault units with grenade launchers and tanks.

And hey! It’s probably not a huge surprise that this hyper-militarization of the police began with our favorite despicable ghoul: Ronald Reagan! In 1981, Reagan passed the “Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act”, which let civilian law enforcement use military facilities, equipment, and training, under the guise of the War on Drugs. By 1990, after close to a century of relentless production by the military industrial complex, the Department of Defense found itself with SO MUCH extra stuff that Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which included a provision to directly transfer military equipment to federal and local law enforcement, and although there were initially some limits, after 9/11 it became a literal free-for-all.

In the last 20 years, over $40 billion dollars of equipment has been distributed to police departments, with absolutely no oversight or management. They do not have to justify why they need it. Just a few years ago, a town of 8,400 residents in West Virginia, ranked as one of the safest cities in the state, requested and received a mine-resistant armored vehicle. And by the way, this equipment goes missing constantly. The few times that these transfers ARE audited, police departments regularly can’t account for millions in missing equipment. And to that end, nothing is done about it.

So let’s call it like it is: what we actually have in the United States is a violent, vengeful, and organized syndicate that cannot be controlled or held accountable by the public. They wield massive political power, siphon billions from our taxes without any oversight, brutalize marginalized communities that dare to stand up in protest, and arm themselves with the same equipment as the most powerful military force in history. Perhaps it’s our fault for thinking ‘protect and serve’ meant us, and not them.