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THE WARS COME HOME

Click here to tell the Pentagon, Congress, and the President: No More Weapons of War for Local Police!

According to the U.S. General Services Administration, one of the programs that allows the Pentagon to give billions of dollars worth of free weapons of war to local U.S. police “offers Americans peace of mind.” Have images of a war zone in Ferguson, Missouri, boosted your peace of mind?

 

Reforming the program that has militarized police will be an uphill fight.

Loading up local police forces with military hardware has crept into the spotlight as a consequence of the reaction to the slaying of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Not that the federal program doing that is new or has gone unnoticed by people whose political views have brought them into direct and sometimes violent contact with the police over the years. As a result of that public attention, there's a move in Congress to chop or reform the program, known as 1033 for the section of the defense budget authorization it was originally part of. As reported previously, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia plans to introduce reform legislation on 1033 when the August recess is over.  Just one problem: The program has considerable Democratic support and opposition to reducing its budget. That became apparent two months ago when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida could only muster 62 votes, including his own, for cutting funding and limiting what kind of hardware could be transferred from the Pentagon to local police agencies. Democrats opposed Grayson on the move by a 3-1 margin. And the majority included 35 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  More

 

A NIGHT IN FERGUSON: Rubber Bullets, Tear Gas, and a Jail Cell

Late Monday evening, after many of the major media outlets covering the protests in Ferguson, Mo., had left the streets to broadcast from their set-ups near the police command center, heavily armed officers raced through suburban streets in armored vehicles, chasing demonstrators, launching tear gas on otherwise quiet residential lanes, and shooting at journalists. Their efforts resulted in one of the largest nightly arrest totals since protests began 10 days ago over the killing of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.   At approximately 2 a.m. local time, Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson announced at a press conference that 31 people had been arrested over the course of the night (NBC News later reported that, according to jail records, the actual total was more than double that). I was unable to attend or report on Johnson’s press conference because I was one of those people… None of the other people who are still there, as far as I know, work for well-funded, high-profile media organizations. Few are white. The concerns these men raised—and the intensity that they have for this moment in Ferguson—runs very deep… Not a single one of these men, through our hours of conversations, expressed any desire to let up. This will not end soon.  More

 

FROM GAZA TO FERGUSON:

Exposing the Toolbox of Racist Repression

From the death and destruction in Israel’s latest war on Gaza to the dramatic arrival of the national guard on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, there have been plenty of brutal reminders on display of the violence that underpins racial hierarchies in Israel and the United States. But amid the headlines, one could easily forget the more sustained and entrenched forms of oppression through which hierarchies of race, citizenship, nationality, and class are produced and maintained—in the United States as well as Israel. Among the most significant of these is mass incarceration… it is important to remember how precarious life is for Palestinian children even in “normal” times. Since 2000, more than 8,000 Palestinian children have been detained and nearly 2,000 children have been killed—with almost complete impunity for the Israeli soldiers and settlers involved… On the other side of the globe, the burgeoning U.S. prison population now comprises a quarter of all the prisoners in the world.  Close to 70 percent of all people in U.S. incarceration, moreover, are people of color. As Adam Gopnik observed in The New Yorker, “there are more black men in the grip of the [U.S.] criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery” on the eve of the civil war… As in Palestine, resistance in the streets of Ferguson has been met with violence, leading several shocked Ferguson protesters to compare the local police to Israeli occupation forces. Some analysts pointed out that Ferguson and St. Louis County police forces had even received training in Israel.   More

 

THOMAS EDSALL: Ferguson, Watts and a Dream Deferred

While the economic downturns of the last decade-and-a-half have taken their toll on the median income of all races and ethnic groups, blacks have been the hardest hit. By 2012, black median household income had fallen to 58.4 percent of white income, almost back to where it was in 1967 — 7.9 points below its level in 1999… Blacks suffered more than whites as a result of the 2008-9 financial meltdown and its aftermath, but the negative trends for African-Americans began before then… Today, however, political and policy-making stasis driven by gridlock — despite a momentary concordance between left and right on this particular shooting — insures that we will undertake no comparable initiatives to reverse or even stem the trends that have put black Americans at an increasing disadvantage in relation to whites — a situation that plays no small part in fueling the rage currently on display in Ferguson.  More

 

12 years of data from New York City suggest stop-and-frisk wasn’t that effective

…a New York Civil Liberties Union report released Wednesday that the group is framing as a comprehensive account of stop-and-frisk during the Bloomberg years. During the mayor's 12-year tenure, police department data show that officers made more than 5 million stops, a quarter of them of young black men who made up just 1.9 percent of the city's population. The NYCLU report documents the racial imbalance that has made the policy so divisive in New York and other cities where the practice has contributed to animosity between minority communities and law enforcement. But the ACLU accounting also points to other data that undermine the rationale for stop-and-frisk: It yielded few weapons when officials justified the policy as a way to reduce shootings and recover guns; in more than 5 million stops, police recovered a gun less than 0.02 percent of the time. And as the NYPD ramped up the number of stops, shootings and murders in the city did not appear to correspondingly decline.  More

 

Palestinians share tear gas advice with Ferguson protesters

Local authorities in Ferguson have begun responding to nightly protests with tear gas and rubber bullets. Palestinians on Twitter could relate, and shared words and images of support with the US protesters… After images of Ferguson police using tear gas were disseminated on Twitter, Palestinians Rajai abuKhalil and Mariam Barghouti drew on their own experiences to express support with protesters in Missouri.

@MariamBarghouti

Solidarity with #Ferguson. Remember to not touch your face when teargassed or put water on it. Instead use milk or coke!

Dear #Ferguson. The Tear Gas used against you was probably tested on us first by Israel. No worries, Stay Strong. Love, #Palestine

 

Israel-trained police "occupy" Missouri after killing of black youth

Since the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police in Missouri last weekend, the people of Ferguson have been subjected to a military-style crackdown by a squadron of local police departments dressed like combat soldiers, prompting residents to liken the conditions on the ground in Ferguson to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine.  And who can blame them? The dystopian scenes of paramilitary units in camouflage rampaging through the streets of Ferguson, pointing assault rifles at unarmed residents and launching tear gas into people’s front yards from behind armored personnel carriers (APCs), could easily be mistaken for a Tuesday afternoon in the occupied West Bank. And it’s no coincidence. 

At least two of the four law enforcement agencies that were deployed in Ferguson up until Thursday evening — the St. Louis County Police Department and the St. Louis Police Department — received training from Israeli security forces in recent years.   More