How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Last edited Wed Apr 6, 2016, 09:20 PM - Edit history (2)
Turning humans into conditioned killing machines - the evidence is everywhere.
It is a self-fulfilling reality born of fear, power and control. When you look into
the eyes of your local police is a human being looking back or some brainwashed,
conditioned automaton?
** Automaton (definition) - a machine or control mechanism designed to follow automatically a predetermined sequence of operations or respond to encoded instructions.
I don't quite buy the article's suggestion that this new domestic form of militarization is 'just' a response to terrorist threats so much as an excuse. The weapons trade, increasingly lawless rogue and privatized militias and mercenaries, and the fascist mindset that has descended like a toxic cloud on the world, has the feel of a more darkly driven and organized assault on humanity as a whole.
At around 9:00 a.m. on May 5, 2011, officers with the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff's Department's Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) team surrounded the home of 26-year-old José Guerena, a former U.S. Marine and veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, to serve a search warrant for narcotics. As the officers approached, Guerena lay sleeping in his bedroom after working the graveyard shift at a local mine. When his wife Vanessa woke him up, screaming that she had seen a man outside the window pointing a gun at her, Guerena grabbed his AR-15 rifle, instructed Vanessa to hide in the closet with their four-year old son, and left the bedroom to investigate.
Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot--or even switching his rifle off of "safety"--he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena's. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.
Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror.
Ever since September 14, 2001, when President Bush declared war on terrorism, there has been a crucial, yet often unrecognized, shift in United States policy. Before 9/11, law enforcement possessed the primary responsibility for combating terrorism in the United States. Today, the military is at the tip of the anti-terrorism spear. This shift appears to be permanent: in 2006, the White House's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism confidently announced that the United States had "broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain."
In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a "soldier's mentality" among their ranks. Though the reasons for this increasing militarization of American police forces seem obvious, the dangerous side effects are somewhat less apparent.
cont'd
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/how-the-war-on-terror-has-militarized-the-police/248047/
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The Atlantic
Turning Policemen Into Soldiers, the Culmination of a Long Trend
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/turning-policemen-into-soldiers-the-culmination-of-a-long-trend/376052/
