How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police - Arthur Rizer & Joseph Hartman - National. Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers.
Here's why we should be alarmed. Danny Moloshok / Reuters 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. 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. 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.
How to Fund an American Police State. This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com. Click here to catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Salisbury discusses post-9/11 police “mission creep” in this country, or download it to your iPod here. At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere. About the Author Stephan Salisbury Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Also by the Author Who is being killed by firearms, and in what numbers? There should have been no surprise. But why drone on? Farewell to Peaceful Private Life Can New York City ever be “secure”? The militarisation of 'war on terror' in the US. New York, NY - In an instructive coincidence, the passage of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) by the US Congress came on December 15, 2011, the same day as the official start of US forces' pullout from Iraq.
One front in the US' post-9/11 conflicts closed overseas, as another front seemingly opened at home. Now awaiting President Barack Obama's signature, which will turn it into law, the NDAA would further entrench here at home some of the defining features of the United States' extraterritorial campaign against political violence by non-state actors, continuing the onward march of the so-called "war on terror" through the American homeland. For years, my students, my colleagues and I have been dealing with the realities of indefinite military imprisonment without trial, and of trial before untested and unfair military commissions. To be clear, the NDAA does not institute martial law for all in the US.
A slippery slope...