The shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, a
district of St. Louis County in Missouri, and the spate of civil unrest
that followed, could set a precedent for the future of American society
according to a senior Iraq war veteran and Pentagon defence analyst.
Terron Sims, an African American active in local Democratic politics who
had previously served five years in the United States Army, told me
during an interview last month that without a fundamental cultural and
institutional change in American policing across the country, the US
could see more Ferguson-type events in the near future.
In an interview in Washington DC where Sims is president of the North
Virginia Black Democrats and on the Board of Principals at the Truman
National Security Project, I asked him whether the Ferguson crisis
offered a taste of things to come.
“This is a taste of the present, my friend. We’re already here. This
is America, today,” said Sims. “And if we don’t deal with the root cause
in terms of widespread racial discrimination against black people, this
will be our tomorrow.”
The Ferguson crisis has sparked a national debate on the culture of
policing in the US toward black communities, as well as the increasing
militarization of the police due to a federal Pentagon programme
providing military-grade equipment to local police forces at little or
no cost.
Last Tuesday, Lt. Col. Jon Belmar, the top police officer in St.
Louis County, justified the extensive deployment of military-grade
equipment to respond to Ferguson unrest. “Had we not had the ability to
protect officers with those vehicles, I am afraid that we would have to
engage people with our own gun fire,” Belmar told
USA Today.
“I really think having the armor gave us the ability not to have pulled
one trigger… I think the military uses armor to be able to provide an
offensive force, and police departments use trucks like that so they
don’t have to.”
The recent provision of
three grenade launchers,
61 rifles and a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle to the Los
Angeles School police department prompted civil rights and education
groups to write to the US Defense Department demanding an end to the
federal supply programme to the LA school system. One unidentified
police official reportedly said that the weapons were needed “for the
safety of staff, students, and personnel” and that the grenade launchers
and armored vehicle would only be used in “very specific
circumstances,” but did not elaborate on the nature of those
circumstances.
In contrast, Terron Sims, a West Point Military Academy graduate and
company commander during the 2003 Iraq war, said, “Police conduct in
Ferguson is a travesty and wake-up call. There are simply no
circumstances in the US where the use of military-grade equipment could
ever be justified to police civilian communities.” During his Iraq
service, Sims was principal civil military officer responsible for
liaising with civilians and civilian authorities in Baghdad. He went on
to become deputy chief of the US Army’s Joint Training Readiness Center
at Fort Polk, finally serving as a senior Pentagon analyst before
retiring into civilian life. “Our squadron had an exemplary record”,
Sims said. “We had to deal with far worse than what the cops on the
streets of Ferguson were facing. I’m talking about US troops faced with
swarms of angry civilians who look at you as invaders. Riots? Protests?
You name it. But we had to be disciplined. My squadron didn’t use force
against a single civilian. In fact, part of my job was making sure that
our squad worked with and alongside the civilians in Tisa Nissan
district, in Baghdad, to ease the transition from a military-run
institution to civilian-led government.”
During our interview, Terron Sims could barely conceal his disgust at
the behaviour of police officers in Ferguson toward civilian
protestors. “I can’t speak for the whole US army in Iraq, but if our
squadron could do it, I don’t understand why American cops can’t.” The
problem, he said, is that racism continues to be a major problem in
American police forces: “This is about an entrenched culture of policing
that doesn’t work with and alongside communities. Instead, we have
police officers roaming around seeing the local community as outsiders,
or even worse, as a homogenous enemy. The cops that are capable of
shooting peaceful, black Americans don’t have relationships with the
black community. They don’t have any outreach.”
I asked him how the police should have handled the situation. “The
first thing I would’ve done if I was the police chief was reach out to
black community leaders,” he said. “Get their take on things and work
with them to restore justifiable confidence in the police’s ability to
actually behave lawfully and accountably. But obviously in this case,
the police clearly don’t have the first idea who the community leaders
are. But to be honest, if I was the police chief, I’d be asking myself
hard questions about how I’d allowed it get to this point in the first
place.”
Sims is hardly an ‘anti-establishment’ activist. A believer in the
political process, he is currently outreach director for the Arlington
County Democratic Committee and chairman of the Veterans and Military
Families Caucusfor the Democratic Party of Virginia. In that context,
his verdict on what Ferguson means for the state of America today is
damning. “The shooting of Michael Brown did not come out of the blue,”
he told me. “Let’s not beat about the bush here. It came about through a
deepening culture of unaccountable racism. And it’s not just about
police racism. Obviously in Ferguson we’re looking at years of police
repression targeted largely at black people, but it goes deeper than
that.”
Police repression, Sims explained, must be understood as part of a
wider racial crisis in American society. “You look at a place like
Ferguson and you see rampant unemployment, poverty and illiteracy in the
black community. These trends have persisted and worsened for years.
And there’s no money to improve things,” said Sims. “Local government is
not investing in education. It’s not investing in jobs, in
infrastructure. But Ferguson is not an isolated case. Shootings of
innocent black people in the US by cops is at epidemic levels. That
follows on the back of massive inequalities between white and black
people across America.”
It is now widely recognized that the racial divide in the United
States has worsened in recent decades along economic lines. In 1970,
33.6 percent of blacks and 10 percent of whites were impoverished. In 2012,
35 percent of blacks lived in poverty, compared to 13 percent of whites. While 5% of white Americans are
unemployed,
more than double — 11% — are black. Nearly three quarters of whites own
their own home, compared to just 43% of blacks. And in the last
25 years, the wealth gap between whites and blacks has nearly tripled.
Median household wealth for whites is about $91,400, but a measly $6,400
for black people.
Economic inequalities are compounded by the acceleration in police
repression of black and ethnic minority communities over the last two
years. Official
police records demonstrate
that, notwithstanding deficiencies in the way information is
catalogued, the victims of police shootings are overwhelmingly male,
heavily young, and disproportionately black.
A startling
independent report into
“extrajudicial killings” of black people in the US by the Malcolm X
Grassroots Movement (MXGM) — an activist organization with chapters in
Atlanta, Detroit, Fort Worth-Dallas, Jackson, New Orleans, New York
City, Oakland, and Washington, DC — raises deeper questions. The report
released in May 2013 — months before the outbreak of violence in
Ferguson — found that an African American male is killed every 28 hours
by US police or vigilantes, with little or no accountability. In 2012, a
total of 313 black people were unlawfully killed in this way.
The report contextualizes this systematic violence against black
communities by US police forces as part of a wider system of racist
repression in which local police departments are entwined with a network
of domestic security structures encompassing “the FBI, Homeland
Security, CIA, Secret Service, prisons, and private security companies,
along with mass surveillance and mass incarceration.” Together, this
domestic national security apparatus “wages a grand strategy of
‘domestic pacification’” through endless “containment campaigns” against
groups designated as problematic or dangerous to the system.
The MXGM analysis coheres disturbingly well with mounting evidence of
Pentagon contingency planning for
“domestic insurgencies” triggered by social, economic, or food shocks,
or natural disasters. US federal government planning documents suggest
that the Pentagon’s role in militarizing local police forces is linked
to growing concerns about domestic civil unrest due to the state coming
under increasing strain from elevated climate, energy and economic
risks.
My
in-depth investigation last
month into the Pentagon’s controversial Minerva research initiative
has, for instance, exposed how the US Defense Department is funding
universities to develop complex new data-mining tools capable of
automatically ranking the threat level from groups and individuals
defined as politically “radical.” Such tools, which according to NSA
whistleblower Thomas Drake could feed directly into the algorithms used
to fine-tune the CIA’s drone kill lists abroad, are increasingly being
used to assess threats from activist and civil society groups in the US
homeland.
In a society where racial tensions are intensifying, this dynamic
inevitably affects marginalised black and ethnic minority communities
disproportionately. Police forces end up being brought into black
communities “with the marching orders, equipment and the mentality of an
occupying army that inevitably results in systematic extrajudicial
killings of citizens without respect for their human rights,” the MXGM
report found. “The adoption of military tactics, equipment, training,
and weapons leads to law enforcement adopting a war-like mentality,”
concurred journalist Adam Hudson on the MXGM report’s conclusions. “They
come to view themselves as soldiers fighting against a foreign enemy
rather than police protecting a community.”
Given the extent of America’s racial divide, does this suggest that
the civil rights movement has failed? I put the question to Terron Sims.
“It’s not that the movement has failed — it’s that it’s not over,” he
told me. “In Ferguson, the conditions have been brewing for a while.
Black people are being shot all across America, but the reason it hasn’t
kicked off everywhere is because the demographics aren’t the same.
Ferguson has a fairly sizeable and concentrated black population, unlike
with the shooting of Trayvon Martin for instance in a district in
Florida, where the black community is more dispersed and certainly more
affluent than in St. Louis.”
Indeed, Ferguson represents a microcosm of these problems, with
wealth inequalities markedly worse than the national average. For
example, census figures for 2012 in St. Louis County show that nearly
half of all African American men are unemployed, compared to just 16
percent for white men.
“At those levels of poverty and inequality, with no jobs available
and nothing to do all day, that’s a serious level of despair and
hopelessness,” said Sims. “You prod and proke a situation like that, and
it’s going to start simmering. You shoot a kid in the street in a
situation like that for no good reason, well then it’s going to
explode.”
For Sims, the only solution is for black communities to mobilise
socially and politically: “Part of the reason there’s no money going
into these communities is because there are no black political
representatives on the scene advocating for those communities. That
needs to change. We need to compel change by engaging with these
institutions.”
If nothing is done to address these bigger, deeper issues of racial
discrimination and inequality, does Ferguson represent the future of the
United States?
“Of course it could”, said Sims. “I’m not saying Fergusons could
happen everywhere, but for sure, if things continue as they are,
there’ll come a point where the combination of unaccountable, rampant
and racist police repression will inflame community tensions in
circumstances of growing levels of deprivation and hopelessness. And
that’s where race riots could become far more of a norm than we might
expect. So unless something changes, yes, Ferguson is our future.”
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is
a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international
security scholar. He has contributed to two major terrorism
investigations in the US and UK, the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7
Coroner’s Inquest, and has advised the Royal Military Academy Sandhust,
British Foreign Office and US State Department. He is a regular
contributor to The Guardian where
he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy
and economic crises. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney
Morning Herald, CounterPunch, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy,
Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His
just released new novel, ZERO POINT, predicted a new war in Iraq to put down an al-Qaeda insurgency. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.
This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This
full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch
features two or three articles from LMD every month.
