Sarah Lazare — Clear Evidence Emerges of Outrageous Militarized Police Collaboration with Oil Companies at Standing Rock Against Protectors

Famous last words. "It can't happen here."

AlterNet
Clear Evidence Emerges of Outrageous Militarized Police Collaboration with Oil Companies at Standing Rock Against Protectors
Sarah Lazare

Tom Boggioni — LRAD's, Steel Batons and Armored Personnel Carriers: Cleveland Cops Stocking up before GOP Convention

Anticipating massive demonstrations in the streets during the Republican National Convention in mid-July, Cleveland police authorities are using emergency funds to stock up on the latest in crowd control equipment — armoring themselves as if they are going to war.

According to the Washington Post, Cleveland officials are using a $50 million “security grant” to beef up security around the convention, but are not tipping their hand on everything that they have purchased which is alarming some civil liberties groups concerned about the rights of protesters.

AlterNet
LRAD's, Steel Batons and Armored Personnel Carriers: Cleveland Cops Stocking up before GOP Convention

Tom Boggioni / Raw Story

Ted Galen Carpenter — The Creeping Miltiarization of American Culture

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex” on American politics and policy. Interestingly, Eisenhower’s original formulation of the menace was the even more accurate “military-industrial-congressional complex.” (Emphasis added). Seeing how that network of special interests has worked its tentacles into so many aspects of American political and economic life in the intervening decades indicates just how prescient was Eisenhower’s warning.

But there has been an even more subtle and pervasive militarization of American culture. It has been evident since World War II, but it has been accelerating markedly in recent years. Perhaps the most corrosive domestic effect of the global interventionist foreign policy that Washington adopted after World War II has been on national attitudes. Americans have come to accept intrusions in the name of “national security” that they would have strongly resisted in previous decades. The various provisions of the Patriot Act and the surveillance regime and its abuses epitomized by the NSA are a case in point.

The trend toward a more intrusive, militaristic state has become decidedly more pronounced since the September 11 attacks and the government’s response, but there were unmistakable signs even before that terrible day. My colleagues at the Cato Institute have done an excellent job documenting the gradual militarization of America’s police forces, beginning in the 1980s, with the proliferation of SWAT teams and the equipping of police units with ever more lethal military hardware.The terrorism threat simply provides the latest, most convenient justification to intensify a trend that was already well underway. Most SWAT raids in fact have nothing to do with terrorism; they are used to serve search or arrest warrants in low-level drug cases.…

Goes along with the gun culture and camo as style. USA, USA, USA!

The National Interest

The Creeping Miltiarization of American Culture
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute

Nafeez Ahmed — Pentagon Allowed to Supply Military Gear Directly to Homeland Security Dept. for ‘War on Immigrants’

Amendments to a controversial Pentagon program to sell military gear to domestic police forces have quietly extended the scheme to provide war on terror weaponry directly to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The amendments for FY2016, passed by Congress in late 2015, were highlighted in a briefing note published by the Congressional Research Service in February 2016. Under the controversial “1033” program, the Department of Defense (DoD) is able to provide “surplus” military-grade equipment to law-enforcement agencies.

The program, legislated for in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), provided local police forces access to billions of dollars worth of high-tech military equipment, including armoured tanks, rocket launchers, automatic weapons, night-vision goggles, and other supplies traditionally used by the U.S. Army in foreign war theaters.

The DHS often provided multimillion-dollar grants to law-enforcement agencies to purchase the military equipment.

To let you feel safer.

Naked Capitalism
Pentagon Allowed to Supply Military Gear Directly to Homeland Security Dept. for ‘War on Immigrants’
Nafeez Ahmed

Claire Bernish — New Report Proves Police Preparing For Rioting On A National Scale

A new report from analysts with industry research group, Sandler Research, forecasts the Global Riot Control System Market for the next four years — but beyond a burgeoning market to parallel the expanding global police state, it appears world governments are also keenly aware of civilian discontent.…

Mint Press News
New Report Proves Police Preparing For Rioting On A National Scale
Claire Bernish

Henry Giroux on State Terrorism and the Ideological Weapons of Neoliberalism — Leslie Thatcher Interview

Public intellectual Henry Giroux discusses his new book, America's Addiction to Terrorism, and the terror that "is now such a central part of the political nervous system in the United States that it's become the major organizing principle of society."

Truthout
Henry Giroux on State Terrorism and the Ideological Weapons of Neoliberalism
Leslie Thatcher, Truthout | Interview

Henry A. Giroux is the founder-animator of Truthout's Public Intellectual Project, a member of Truthout's board of directors and a frequent contributor - currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and the Paulo Freire Chair in Critical Pedagogy at the McMaster Institute for Innovation and Excellence in Teaching and Learning. He is also a distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University.

M. David — Police Unions Claim Cops Have The Right To Take Steroids So ‘They’ll Have the Upper Hand’

"We have to take drugs because they do." I kid you not. Goes along with, "We have to arm up because they do." Then it  becomes all downhill from there.

Counter Current News
Police Unions Claim Cops Have The Right To Take Steroids So ‘They’ll Have the Upper Hand’

M. David

Bethania Palma Markus — Florida Sheriff Furious Obama Took His Military Tank Away

Volusia County Sheriff Ben Johnson said losing an M113 — an armored personnel carrier — will result in some of his officers going on “suicide missions,” the Orlando Sentinel reports.

“People will die because of this decision,” Johnson told the paper.
Volusia County still has another tank, an MRAP — Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle. But the difference is the M113 has tracks instead of wheels that allow it to travel in terrains wheels won’t go.

“The idea that our president will take this stuff away from us, the M113 (armored personnel carrier), puts not only our deputies in harm’s way but the citizens in harm’s way,” Johnson fumed to the News-Journal. “It’s obvious from some of the decisions he’s made that he really doesn’t care a whole lot about law enforcement officers.”…

The president must fire those whose idea this was in the first place. Bonkers in a liberal democracy.

AlterNet
Florida Sheriff Furious Obama Took His Military Tank Away

Bethania Palma Markus / Raw Story

George Joseph — New Swat Documents Give Snapshot Of Ugly Militarization Of U.S. Police

Power that would make the Gestapo. KGB, and Stasi drool with envy.

This is nuts.

It's sending the wrong message both domestically and internationally. Or maybe it's the right message — the one the TPTB want to send.

The Intercept

New Swat Documents Give Snapshot Of Ugly Militarization Of U.S. Police

George Joseph 

My podcast for Tuesday, March 3.

Here's my podcast for March 3.

Fred Mazelis — New police unit in New York: The ruling elite prepares for class struggle

According to de Blasio’s Police Commissioner, William Bratton, the new force will be “designed for dealing with events like our recent protests [against police brutality] or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.” 

The unit will be “equipped and trained in ways our normal patrol officers are not,” said Bratton in a speech to the Police Foundation last week. They will have “extra protective gear, the long rifles, machine guns, as is unfortunately necessary sometimes in these instances.” 

Bratton’s spokesman tried to claim after his speech that the unit was not directed against protests, but little attempt was made to explain why, in that case, the commissioner had specifically insisted, “The officers will have the dedicated mission of protecting locations (and) being able to assist us in dealing with demonstrations.” He added that the new unit would be used for “disorder control.” 

Bratton, a highly-connected police official with decades of experience including a stint in New York itself two decades ago, is not losing his way with words. He meant what he said, even if he now wants to reformulate the policy in the wake of a public backlash.... 

De Blasio’s new unit is entirely in line with the Obama administration’s efforts to combine “community policing” with a continued, and indeed expanded, militarization of police forces throughout the country. 

Last year, the White House appointed a “Task Force on 21st Century Policing,” headed by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who has a long history of attacking democratic rights. At the same time, the Obama administration has approved the continuation of Pentagon programs to transfer equipment to local forces, calling for measures to regularize this relationship and provide greater training in the use of military gear....

WSWS
New police unit in New York: The ruling elite prepares for class struggle
Fred Mazelis

Dara Lind — Why police officers often resort to lethal force as their first response

Why you are in mortal peril if a police officer thinks he is in mortal peril. As the fear factor rises, it doesn't take much.

VOX
Why police officers often resort to lethal force as their first response
Dara Lind

Also

Truthout | Op-Ed
A New Year's Resolution: Don't Call the Police
Mike Ludwig

Zaid Jilani — The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State

The shameful complicity of Democratic leaders in creating our out-of-control, militarized police forces.

Remember when Democrats were accused of being "soft on crime"? Remember "law and order Democrats" as part of triangulation?

This is a story that begins when Bill Clinton embraced the law-and-order policies of his Republican predecessors.

The war on drugs morphed into a race war on non-whites, chiefly Blacks and Hispanics.

Clinton was a “New Democrat” – part of a new coalition of Democrats who believed that the liberalism represented by the New Deal and Great Society had run its course, and that Democrats must court Big Business and certain right-wing interest groups in order to forge a new party. 

Included in this policy shift were things like “welfare reform,” the North American Free Trade Agreement, and deregulation of the telecommunications and banking industries. But perhaps Clinton's earliest and most intense shifting of traditional Democratic Party liberalism was with respect to crime. This took the form of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (later commonly known as the crime bill). To helm its passage, Clinton tapped none other than our current vice president, then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.…

AlterNet

The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State
Zaid Jilani

Stephen Rosenfeld — Federal Appeals Court Ridicules Florida Cops For Using SWAT Team To Check On Barbershop Licenses

“It was a scene right out of a Hollywood movie,” the Court’s ruling began. “Teams from the OCSO [Orange County Sheriff’s Office] descended... with some team members dressed in ballistic vests and masks, and with guns drawn, the deputies rushed into their target destinations, handcuffed the stunned occupants—and demanded to see their barbers’ licenses. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office was providing muscle for the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s [DBPR] administrative inspection of barbershops to discover licensing violations.” 

The Cout’s 44-page ruling, which will allow four barbers to proceed with a lawsuit that the cops violated their Fourth Amendment protection from unconstitutional searches, vividly describes how a team of local and state police ran amok—and then claimed immunity from prosecution, which the Court rejected, when the raid’s victims sued. 

Notably, the ruling didn’t even talk about the blatant constitutional violations first, but instead snidely asked if the cops involved were complete idiots who thought they were so far above the law that they could ignore previous multiple rulings from the very same Court ordering cops not to conduct militarized SWAT raids as a routine tactic….

AlterNet
Federal Appeals Court Ridicules Florida Cops For Using SWAT Team To Check On Barbershop Licenses

Stephen Rosenfeld

Cosme Caal — A Warning: The Latin Americanization of U.S. Police Forces

Counterpunch:

A Warning 

The Latin Americanization of U.S. Police Forces 

by COSME CAAL
Guatemala City 

From Guatemala City I have been keeping up with the events in Ferguson, Missouri and my heart goes out to those United States citizens who are actively resisting a brutal local police state. I sit awake at night and contemplate how one of the greatest nations in the world has become militarized and despotic. Impunity is now normalized in most police departments across the United States and in the minds of many Americans. I did not know I would live to see this phenomenon, yet, the more I peruse online news feeds, the more evident it is to me that Americans, especially minorities, are in great danger of militarized suppression as a matter of state policy. 

From our experience in half a century in Latin America I can tell you that, once the human rights of a minority are compromised, it is only a matter of time before they are compromised for an entire nation. From that same experience I can tell you it will take decades before they can be regained. Militarized police forces take on a life of their down, at the expense of the society’s well-being. The social contract that gives the state the duty to organize police forces itself becomes obsolete, almost a joke. Citizens begin to obey agents of the state not out of respect or cooperation, but out of fear of those sworn to protect them. Eventually, the militarized power of the police reaches such magnitude that political leaders lose all ability to rein them in. We experienced this USA-backed militarized transformation of the police in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, and Colombia. What the U.S. helped do to Latin America, it is now doing to itself. 

Even when there will officers who want to adhere to the law, militarized policing organizations become an unstoppable and despotic force. The very ideologies that give them life become obsolete, as do all existing laws that protect citizens. Central American dictatorships backed and armed by the United States government in the 1970’s built police forces, outfitted them with military gear, and allowed them to brutalize and kill with impunity. The murder or incarceration of progressive democratic leaders who resisted this transformation was sanctioned by United States intelligence agencies.....

Diane Goldstein — Take It From a Cop: The Drug War Poisons Community Policing

The Ferguson riots are the latest high-profile example of the deep schism between American law enforcement and the communities it serves. This schism has been made demonstrably worse by the way the drug war has blurred the police mission. The community policing mission should always be fundamentally different to that of the military—yet that often hasn’t been the case, thanks in large part to wrongheaded policies put in place decades ago. 

The long history of racial disparity in the enforcement of our drug policies was greatly exacerbated by the architect of the modern war on drugs, Richard Nixon. His vision was to create a crime- and violence-free society—but his false belief was that black heroin addicts were the primary cause of crime in our communities. 

Nixon once stated to his aide H.R. Haldeman, “you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” 

Nixon’s dream of devising a criminal justice system that targets communities of color through the mechanism of our drug policies was achieved. According to the ACLU report “ War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” among myriad other sources, law enforcement’s attempt to eradicate drug use in America has hit communities of color the hardest.…

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) speaker and retired police chief Dr. Joseph McNamara once noted the effect of war language on law enforcement professionals: 

“When you’re telling cops that they’re soldiers in a Drug War, you’re destroying the whole concept of the citizen peace officer, a peace officer whose fundamental duty is to protect life and be a community servant. General Colin Powell told us during the Persian Gulf War what a soldier’s duty is. It’s to kill the enemy. And when we allowed our politicians to push cops into a war that they’ll never win, they can’t win, and let them begin to think of themselves as soldiers, the mentality comes that anything goes.”

AlterNet
Take It From a Cop: The Drug War Poisons Community Policing
Diane Goldstein | Substance.com
Then it was a short step to criminalizing dissent, which Nixon also attempted to do at the time of the Vietnam anti-war movement, especially after the bombing of Cambodia and the mass protests that followed. Of course, 9/ll and the Global War on Terror greatly amplified that.

See also Mike Konczal, Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem, at Rortybomb.

Before it was anything else, the neoconservative movement was a theory of the urban crisis. As a reaction to the urban riots of the 1960s, it put an ideological and social-scientific veneer on a doctrine that called for overwhelming force against minor infractions -- a doctrine that is still with us today, as people are killed for walking down the street in Ferguson and allegedly selling single cigarettes in New York. But neoconservatives also sought, rather successfully, to position liberalism itself as the cause of the urban crisis, solvable only through the reassertion of order through the market and the police.… 

As James Q. Wilson explained in the 1982 Atlantic Monthly article that popularized the topic, “the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community.” 

Before the modern liberal state of accountability and due process, the police force wasn't judged by “its compliance with appropriate procedures” but instead by its success in maintaining order. Since the 1960s, “the shift of police from order maintenance to law enforcement has brought them increasingly under the influence of legal restrictions… The order maintenance functions of the police are now governed by rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals,” writes Wilson. According to this theory, order is preserved by the police out there, acting in the moment against minor infractions with a strong display of force, not by liberal notions of accountability and fairness.  

This neoconservative vision that started in the 1960s and continues into today doesn’t just inform local arguments about policing, but rather the entire policy debate. So much of the debate over the (neo)conservative movement emphasizes suburban warriors, or evangelicals, or the Sun Belt, or the South. But as Alice O’Connor demonstrates in her paper "The Privatized City: The Manhattan Institute, the Urban Crisis, and the Conservative Counterrevolution in New York," there was a distinct urban character to this thinking as well. Rather than a crisis of race relations, police violence, poverty, or anything else, rioting and the broader urban crisis were framed by the neoconservative movement as a crisis of values and culture precipitated by liberalism.

The broader urban crisis, in this story, hinges not on structural issues but on personal morality and behavior that can be restored by the extension of the market. Crime and urban “disorder” fit right next to social engineering and failing state institutions as a corrupt legacy of the liberal project and its bureaucratic, administrative governing state. Only the conservative agenda, as O'Connor puts it, of “zero-tolerance law enforcement, school ‘choice,’ hard-nosed implementation of welfare reform, and the large-scale privatization of municipal and social services” is capable of dismantling it. Only through the market, individual responsibility, and freedom from government “interference” can order result from the restoration of “political and cultural authority to a resolutely anti-liberal elite.” This legacy harnesses police excess to the triumph of the market. And as we see, it will be hard to dislodge one while the other reigns supreme.

Medea Benjamin — Police Departments Shouldn't Become Dumping Grounds for Weapons Makers

Public good, or pork barrel for the defense industry? File under WTF?!

Your head will spin if you take a look at this map the New York Times published on August 21. It lists the counties that have received military surplus and the supplies they’ve received. The acquisitions under the Department of Defense (DOD) program since its inception in 1991 are valued at $5.1 billion, with $449.3 million given out in fiscal year 2013 alone. In just the past 5 years, as part of Section 1033 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997, the Pentagon has given away “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” to counties in every state throughout the country.

While attention is now focused on the DOD’s program, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a program that is three times the size. This year alone, DHS plans to give away $1.6 billion worth of military equipment for counterterrorism, border security and disaster preparedness. Thanks to DHS, every squad car in Fargo, North Dakota, has assault rifles and kevlar helmets and 1,500 beat cops in Philadelphia are trained to use AR-15s.

DHS is also giving out money for a few dozen police departments to experiment with drones. When the Federal Aviation Administration opens US airspace to drones in the coming years, civil liberty advocates fear that the nation’s 18,000 police departments will be lining up for DHS grants to get their latest toy--a toy that has the capacity to spy, stun, maim and kill.

This is already starting. In May 2012, DHS began distributing $4 million in experimental grants to help local law enforcement agencies buy their own small drones, opening a new market for politically connected drone makers as the wars overseas shrink. The sheriff’s department in Montgomery County, Texas received a $250,000 grant to buy a drone, which in April 2014 crashed into Lake Conroe and was destroyed. In 2013, citizens of Seattle pressured police into returning two drones they had received from DHS grants for $82,000. The drones were then pawned off on the LA Police Department, which is now facing a citizen backlash to get rid of them.

In the past, Congress has done nothing to rollback the handouts. When Congressman Alan Grayson introduced legislation in June to limit funding to the 1033 program, it was quashed by an overwhelming vote of 355-62, including 35 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who voted against it.….

Worse than traffic cameras for revenue generation as a replacement for taxation.

AlterNet

Police Departments Shouldn't Become Dumping Grounds for Weapons Makers
Medea Benjamin

See also, Steve Holland and Andrea Shalal, Obama orders review of U.S. police use of military hardware, Reuters

Key concerns include a clause in the program that requires police to use the equipment within a year, something the American Civil Liberties Union argues may give police forces an incentive to use the equipment in inappropriate situations. The program also does not mandate training for crowd control or other uses.…

U.S. weapons makers have been eyeing what they call "adjacent" markets for years, keen to drum up fresh demand for products initially developed for the military, and recently, to offset declines in U.S. and European military spending. 

Faced with a dwindling number of big-ticket military contracts, even the Pentagon's largest suppliers such as Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) and Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N) are competing for increasingly smaller contracts in commercial or non-military markets, analysts and industry executives said. 

Among the products marketed to state and local officials are military-grade communications equipment, radios, night-vision goggles, drones and other surveillance equipment.…

Christopher Mathias — Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly Thinks Police In Ferguson Are Out Of Hand

Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly once boasted that his department-- which he described as a "quasi-military organization"-- had “some means to take down a plane" if necessary.

It was this same militarized police force that, under Kelly, conducted a midnight raid on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in 2011, rounding up and arresting journalists and scores of Occupy Wall Street protesters.

It was Kelly who defended his department after the Associated Press uncovered its surveillance of the city's Muslim communities.
Amidst growing outrage, Kelly also defended his department's use of stop-and-frisk. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were stopped by police during his stint as commissioner, the overwhelming majority of whom were black or Latino.

And it was during Kelly's tenure as commissioner that police officers killed Sean Bell, Tamon Robinson, and Ramarley Graham -- all unarmed black men.

And yet, even Ray Kelly thinks police in Ferguson, Missouri, have gone way too far in their handling of the turmoil after the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson last week….

The Huffington Post
Ray Kelly Thinks Police In Ferguson Are Out Of Hand
Christopher Mathias

Brad Friedman — Tale of Two Protests: The Armed Bundy Bunch and the Peaceful Demonstrators of Ferguson

Brad Blog
Tale of Two Protests: The Armed Bundy Bunch and the Peaceful Demonstrators of Ferguson
Brad Friedman

The militarization of America's police and law enforcement continues

This is a very scary trend and I saw it first hand during the Occupy protests back in 2011, where heavily militarized NYPD units moved on peaceful protesters.

There is no "un-doing" this at this point and since the "owners" of our country (i.e. the 1-percent, corporations, billionaires, etc) control law enforcement and the justice system, they can pretty much get away with anything. The rest of us are slaves.

Part of what's known as the "1033 Program" passed by Congress in 1997 and meant to augment police departments fighting the drug war, military gear is showing up in large numbers, and in some unlikely places...

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