Coming Home to Roost
American Militarism, War Culture, and Police Brutality
by Colin Jenkins / February 27th, 2014
President Kennedy never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon…
— Malcolm X, December 1, 1963
“Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love
the sting and clash of battle… you are here because you are real men and
all real men like to fight!” The thundering voice rang out from the large box speakers situated across the damp, cement floor. ”
Americans
love a winner! Americans will not tolerate a loser! Americans despise
cowards! Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot
in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never
lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to
an American! ” The words surged violently from the mesh screens,
ostensibly louder by the second. A quick glance across the concrete quad
produced a herd of silhouettes, all frantically running to their
predetermined spots in the haze of a 4:00 AM-fog.
“We don’t want
yellow cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats! If
not, they will go home after this war and breed more cowards! The brave
men will breed more brave men. Kill off the God-damned cowards and we
will have a nation of brave men!” It was the summer of 1994. I was
19 years old. The words screaming from those speakers – a daily sound
that I would become accustomed to over the course of a few weeks – were
those of U.S. Army General George Patton (through the voice of George C.
Scott). The location was Columbia, South Carolina, though it might as
well have been halfway across the world because the only things I would
see for the next two months were marching drills, firing ranges, fields
of mud and grass, and miles upon miles of indistinguishable running
terrain. This was US Army Basic Training and I was one of thousands of
recruits eager to soak up the glory of “defending our country.”
Everything that is done in basic military training is done with
intent. The primary goal is to develop and condition killing machines –
human beings who are capable of exterminating other human beings on
command. The corollary effects of this development are vast. The
transforming of one’s self to a component of a “well-oiled machine.” The
suppressing of human emotion, and even human reason. The extraction of,
as Patton suggested, cowardice – in other words, compassion,
understanding, empathy, or simply anything that would cause a soldier to
stop and question what they are doing at any given time. The ultimate
goal of this training is to make one robotic – the finished product of a
process of dehumanization, whereas one is forced to shed elements of
humanity out of necessity; and, in doing so, runs the risk of viewing
others in less than humane ways. It is difficult to deny that, in the
event a person finds themselves in the midst of war, this training
becomes invaluable. The chaotic, unpredictable, and nerve-rattling
environment that is inherent with any battlefield does not allow for
time to think. It does not allow for time to reflect. It only allows for
conditioned reaction — proactive and reactive measures that are
designed to create efficient “soldiering” and optimum survival.
Soldiers, themselves, lose a great deal of autonomy in this process.
On a hot and hazy July afternoon, just a few days before my introduction
to the words of Patton, as I joined hundreds of others in a frantic
scramble off a convoy of refurbished school buses, I lost myself. I
became a blank slate. I became a shell of a young man, readily available
for shaping, sculpting and conditioning as my new makers saw fit. Life
suddenly took on a whole new meaning. I was now accountable to others,
as they were accountable to me; and our accountability was on parade for
all to see. If anyone stepped out of line, questioned anything,
considered alternatives, or attempted to think for themselves, their
“irresponsible defiance” was immediately transferred to public
humiliation. However, our forced accountability to one another —
something we as a society could certainly use more of — was not an
issue. It was the underlying purpose of this accountability that becomes
questionable in retrospect. Ultimately, it rested on the acceptance of
our roles as tools of war, something that would develop steadily in our
subconscious. Already armed with abstract notions of patriotism,
American exceptionalism and moral superiority, our self-inscribed
‘greater good’ was now supplemented with an inescapable obligation to
fulfill orders. This is the inherent psychology of ‘soldiering’ — a role
that requires a prolonged and nuanced conditioning that begins at a
very early age.
Objectification, Empathy Erosion, and an Internalized Culture of War and Oppression
In the United States, the process of objectification begins at a
young age. Americans are conditioned by everything from television,
music, and marketing to sports, pornography, and even their parents, to
objectify others. Gender roles play a major part in this process. Males
are taught to objectify the female body; and females are taught to
embrace this objectification by basing their self-worth on outward
appearance. Correspondingly, females are taught to objectify males as
dominant protectors; and males are taught to embrace this
objectification by basing their worth on machismo, aggression, and
physical prowess.
According to philosopher Martha Nussbaum, objectification occurs in
various ways. A person may be objectified if they are treated:
- as a tool for another’s purposes (instrumentality);
- as if lacking in agency or self-determination (denial of autonomy, inertness);
- as if owned by another (ownership);
- as if interchangeable (fungibility);
- as if permissible to damage or destroy (violability);
- as if there is no need for concern for their feelings and experiences (denial of subjectivity).
Our collective conditioning runs the gamut of Nussbaum’s list. First
and foremost, objectification (or reification) is a prerequisite to our
dominant economic system of capitalism. By objectifying others, people
become more suitable participants in this scheme that thrives off
exploitation and alienation. With this conditioning, the CEO is more apt
at seeing employees as numbers on a spreadsheet, the banker is able to
view clients as nothing more than borrowers, the landlord is able to
view a family simply as renters, and the boss sees nothing but workers
who need to be prodded like cattle. People, essentially, become sources
of income and profit to those who are willing to use them as such. And,
perhaps more importantly, these “sources” are gradually shaped into
willing participants along the way, apathetically giving in to systems
of power and control.
This coercive nature naturally extends into the socio-political
realm, where wealthy politicians are more than willing to use working
class children as pawns of war, allowing their lives to be extinguished
and bodies to be mangled for stock portfolios. This dehumanizing process
also creates a world where these same politicians see citizens as
nothing but fickle subjects, the government seeks to control “the mob,”
the soldier sees only enemies, and the police officer only criminals in
desperate need of order and discipline. It is, as Vasily Grossman once
warned, a society where man has ceased to exist, unavoidably being
replaced with “man-like creatures that have undergone an internal
transformation.”
“When people are solely focused on the pursuit of their own
interests, they have all the potential to be unempathic,” explains Simon
Baron-Cohen, a professor at Cambridge University. What has occurred in
this process, according to Baron-Cohen, is a societal phenomenon of
“empathy erosion.” Quite simply, “When our empathy is switched off, we
are solely in the ‘I’ mode. In such a state, we relate only to things or
to people as if they were just things.”
While this naturally occurs within everyone from time to time, its
expansion in American culture has become the pervasive product of a “me,
first” mentality created by the marketization and commodification of
everything from sex and violence to human services and education.
The significance of this development is profound. Essentially, the
more we dehumanize interactions, or the more we make human contact
impersonal, the more willing we are to engage in forceful, aggressive,
and unempathic interactions with others — behaviors that are (it’s worth
noting) viewed as positive attributes within the sports world many of
us grow up in, and the business world many of us enter as adults. In
this sense, it is not competition — in and of itself — that represents a
problem; but rather, it is the objectifying nature of coercive
relations that pose as competition within any hierarchical society.
The act of objectifying others, whether treating them as
“interchangeable tools” to be used at your disposal or simply stunting
their self-determination in some manner, is a reciprocal process that is
internalized by both parties. The objectifier, through the process of
dehumanizing the objectified, becomes less human themselves. This
internalization is what allows for a culture of war and oppression to
persist. America’s “war culture” is shaped by a myriad of factors. First
and foremost, we are an imperialist country. The US has been at war,
involved in a foreign conflict, or militarily occupied foreign territory
(or all three) for
216 years of its 237-year existence.
War is our business, and we do it well. And yes, common, everyday
Americans have benefitted in some form or another from war (i.e. the
formation of an “industrialized middle class”); however, these
“benefits” haven’t come without sacrifice — the most prominent of which
is a collectively misery that has been brought to much of the world’s
population through colonialism, geopolitical land grabs, and the theft
of natural resources. War is, essentially, nourishment for a parasitical
corporate hierarchy that takes what it wants and discards of the
scraps, allowing them to “trickle down” to the rest of the world,
including the working class in the US.
With a vast majority of Americans coming from this working class,
widespread victimization — and a stubborn acceptance of it — represents a
“rite of passage” in our culture. Whether through impoverished
circumstances, socioeconomic limitations, substandard education, a
general sense of exploitation that is realized as we grow older, or the
grueling, existential crisis we all seem to face at one point or
another, we are all victims of repression and exploitation on some
level. This has never been more evident than during the past four
decades. And the notion that we are to avoid “the victim card” at all
costs — as it is supposedly a sign of “weakness” — is laughable when
considering the immense amount of injustice we face as a whole: drowned
out by corporate power, strangled by government suppression, working
more and more while making less and less, forced into consumer debt,
dealing with skyrocketing costs of living, chained by student debt, etc.
The class-based oppression and victimization which stem from our
embedded hierarchy present peculiar dynamics in terms of carrying out
the violent projection of war culture. The fact that soldiers and police
officers — the hired guns of the ruling classes — almost always come
from working-class backgrounds is especially interesting when
considering their roles as enforcers of the very ideology that attacks
their class peers. However, when combined with this process of
objectification that has become commonplace, an immersion into a
deep-seated “war culture” and militarism, and the robotic programming of
military or police training, it comes as little surprise that a
demographic consisting predominantly of white males is able to complete
this transition from working-class oppressed to working-class oppressor
with relative ease. Educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire, eloquently
describes this process of transformation through internalization:
The very structure of their thought has been conditioned
by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which
they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is
to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon
derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their
existential experience, adopt an attitude of “adhesion” to the
oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot “consider” themselves.
This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they
are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is
impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this
level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does
not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction;
the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its
opposite pole.
This widespread process of internalization is crucial to those
wishing to maintain an inherently unjust and oppressive status quo. For,
in order to keep such a system intact, the very few who benefit from
this arrangement must rely on some members of the working class to
ignore or shed themselves of class-consciousness on their way to
breaking class ranks and carrying out the violent acts needed to
sustain. Professor Abdul JanMohamed tells us, “according to (Antonio)
Gramsci, any hegemony is subtended, in the final analysis, by the
deployment of violence; and for hegemony to function as such, the
masters’ rules, including the deployment of violence, must be adequately
internalized.”
Without this internalization, human beings — and especially those
coming from the working classes — would be left to act on their own
interests, something that would not serve the ruling classes well.
American Militarism and White Supremacy
Any discussion involving American militarism must include the
underpinnings of white supremacy, an all-encompassing ideology which has
ravaged the lives and communities of non-white peoples for centuries.
White supremacy is fueled by objectification and, more specifically, the
collective dehumanization of peoples of color. Its power lies in the
fact that it not only transcends the fundamental societal arrangement of
class, but that it is embraced largely by working class whites who have
shown a willingness to internalize and project their own oppression
onto others – in this case, the non-white working classes.
Not surprisingly, this foundation extends far beyond the geographic confines of the US, representing the basis for which the “
White Man’s Burden” and age-old foreign policies like the
Roosevelt Corollary of the
Monroe Doctrine
operate. The ties that bind what Martin Luther King, Jr. once referred
to as “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism” cannot
be underestimated, as they provide the self-righteous, societal
“justification” necessary to carry out indiscriminate acts of aggression
both here and abroad. Social theorist bell hooks’ assessment of George
Zimmerman, the self-appointed neighborhood watchman turned murderer of
Trayvon Martin, captures this mindset: “White supremacy has taught him
that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior.
Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must
be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be
proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it
would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action.”
When Muhammad Ali refused to fight in Vietnam, famously stating, “I
ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong; No Viet Cong ever called me
nigger,” he was referring to the dominant power structure of white
supremacy that had not only subjugated him in his own country, but also
had global implications regarding imperialism, colonialism, and
ever-increasing militarism. Ali, along with other conscious Black
Americans, recognized life in the U.S. as a microcosm of the war in
Vietnam. Whether in Birmingham, Alabama or the Ben Tre Province in South
Vietnam, black and brown people were being murdered indiscriminately.
African Americans had their share of enemies at home — Bull Connor,
George Wallace, the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI, Jim Crow — and, for good
reason, had no vested interest in wars abroad. Their priorities were
defense and self-preservation in their homeland; not offense and
destruction in Vietnam.
Racism is a cousin to militarism, and its influence on shaping
American culture over the years is undeniable. Despite misconceptions,
reconstruction in the post-slavery US was no more kind to Black
Americans than during colonial years, especially in the southern states.
“In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the lynching of Black
people in the Southern and border states became an institutionalized
method used by whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy,”
explains
Robert A. Gibson. “In the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there
was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led
white mobs to turn to ‘lynch law’ as a means of social control.” These
lynchings were almost always spontaneous, rooted in white supremacist
and racist emotion, and void any semblance of due process. They were
also mostly supported — whether through direct supervision or “turning a
blind eye” — by local politicians, judges, and police forces.
According to Tuskegee Institute figures, between the years 1882 and
1951, 3,437 African Americans were lynched in the United States — a
tally that amounts to roughly 50 per year, or a little over 4 per month
through the lifespan of an entire generation.
Essentially, for nearly a century, “freed” slaves were still very much
at the mercy of, as WEB DuBois once noted, “men who hated and despised
Negroes and regarded it as loyalty to blood, patriotism to country, and
filial tribute to the fathers to lie, steal or kill in order to
discredit these black folk.”
This general hatred was not only projected by white citizens throughout
the country, but remained institutionalized by laws of racial
segregation — also known as “Jim Crow” — in much of the US until the
1960s.
While the courageous and awe-inspiring Civil Rights movement of the
’60s was successful in curbing some government-backed segregation, the
ugly stain of white supremacy has endured well into the 21st century
through a convoluted lens of extreme poverty, poor education, lack of
opportunity, and disproportionate imprisonment. It has become blatantly
evident within the world of ‘criminal justice,’ and more specifically
through the ways in which law enforcement engages and interacts with
Black communities across America.
Modern forms of lynching have gained a foothold with laws such as New York City’s
“Stop and Frisk”
and Florida’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” — with both providing legal
outlets to harass and kill Black Americans at an alarming rate. However,
even before such laws, police officers terrorized inner-cities for
decades. The most glaring example occurred in 1991 with the beating of
Rodney King — an incident that uncovered a deliberate and widespread
brand of racist policing as well as “an organizational culture that
alienates itself from the public it is designed to serve” while teaching
“to command and confront, not to communicate.”
The 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman served as a
sobering reminder of the tragically subhuman value that has placed on
black life in America. Martin’s death rightfully brought on cries of an
“open season on young black men,” while another 2012 murder, this time
of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, who was shot and killed by Michael Dunn in
broad daylight while sitting in a car with three friends, reiterated
this fact. Like Martin, Davis was unarmed and posed no threat — and
certainly not enough of a threat to justify lethal force. In Davis’
case, the murderer, Dunn, indiscriminately fired 8 bullets into the
vehicle where Davis and his friends were sitting. The public reaction to
the two murders (adults killing unarmed children, mind you), especially
from those who somehow felt compelled to defend the killers, as well as
the subsequent trials, the posthumous (and false) ‘criminalizing’ of
the victims with decontextualized images and information, and the total
absence of justice on both accounts — all products of a long-standing
culture of white supremacy — exposed the lie that is “post-racial”
America.
However, these reactions were and are nothing new. It has been “open
season” on young black males for many years in the US, and very few
outside African American or activist communities couldn’t care less. One
study estimates that “one Black person is killed every 24 hours by police, security guards, or vigilantes.”
Furthermore, “43% of the(se) shootings occurred after an incident of racial profiling,” Adam Hudson
tells us.
“This means police saw a person who looked or behaved “suspiciously”
largely because of their skin color and attempted to detain the suspect
before killing them.
Many of the victims of these “extrajudicial” killings posed no threat
at the time of their murders, as was the case with Amadou Diallo, Sean
Bell, Oscar Grant, Aaron Campbell, Orlando Barlow, Steven Eugene
Washington, Ervin Jefferson, Kendrec Mcdade, Kimani Gray, Wendell Allen,
Ronald Madison, James Brisette, Tavares McGill, and Victor Steen, to
name a few.
Some, like Brisette (17), Gray (16), McGill (16), and Steen (17), were
children. Others, like Madison and Steven Eugene Washington, were
mentally ill or autistic. All were unarmed.
If the Rodney King trial taught us (and police) anything, it was that
officers in the US can inexplicably beat an unarmed and non-threatening
Black man to near-death and face no consequences for doing so. Twenty
years later, this unaccountability on the part of law enforcement has
evolved into an overly-aggressive and often fatal approach to
interacting with innocent, young black men. This has never been more
evident than during a rash of indiscriminate and blatant acts of police
brutality in recent years. All peoples of color have become viable
targets, and some of the most alarming examples have been directed at
children and people with special needs and disabilities.
In 2009, a 16-year-old autistic boy,
Oscar Guzman,
was chased into his family’s restaurant by two Chicago police officers
after they questioned him for “watching pigeons.” Guzman, who was posing
no threat and breaking no laws, was “struck in the head with a
retractable baton, causing a four-centimeter laceration that had to be
closed with staples at a nearby hospital.”
In 2011, two Miami-Dade officers stopped 22-year-old Gilberto Powell,
who has Down syndrome, due to a “suspicious bulge” coming from his
waistband. When the officers confronted Powell and began patting him
down, Powell became frightened and ran. The officers caught up and
beat him. The “bulge” turned out to be a colostomy bag. Powell was unarmed and breaking no laws.
In November of 2013, a 14-year-old child was “roughed up” and Tasered
by police in Tullytown, Pennsylvania after being caught shoplifting at a
local Wal-Mart. The child suffered a broken nose, multiple abrasions,
and two swollen and black eyes as a result. He was unarmed and posed no
threat to the officers.
On January 3, 2014, 64-year-old
Pearl Pearson
was pulled over by police on suspicion of leaving the scene of an
accident. After Pearson failed to show his hands when instructed by
officers, a “7-minute altercation ensued” and Pearson was severely
beaten. He was unarmed and posed no threat. The reason he did not show
his hands as ordered: he’s deaf – a fact that is displayed on a sign
attached to his car.
Other examples include the unnecessary brutalization of incapacitated
individuals, as well as the emergence of a universal, reckless
“shoot-first” mentality. The most recognizable incident was the 2009
street execution of Oscar Grant by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)
Policeman, Johannes Mehserle. Following a brush-up with other
passengers, Grant and a friend were apprehended by officers who had them
lay prone on the ground. Grant was “restrained, unarmed,” and had “his
hands behind his back,” when the officer shot him in the back, killing
him. The entire incident was caught on video.
Shockingly, occurrences like this have become common with relatively little fanfare. In May of 2013, 33-year-old
David Sal Silva
was beaten to death by California officers after he was stopped and
questioned for suspected public intoxication. “When I got outside I saw
two officers beating a man with batons, and they were hitting his head
so every time they would swing, I could hear the blows to his head,”
said witness Ruben Ceballos, who told the Californian the noise was so
loud it woke him up. Sal Silva, unarmed, “begged for his life” before
being bludgeoned to death for no apparent reason.
In September of 2013, following a car accident, 24-year-old
Jonathan Ferrell
was shot 10 times by Charlotte police officer, Randall Kerrick. After
knocking on the door of a nearby home, Ferrell spotted the officer and
began running towards him for help when Kerrick opened fire. Ferrell was
unarmed, posed no threat, and was merely seeking assistance after
accidentally crashing his car into a tree line off the road. He died
instantly. That same month, Long Beach police officers were captured on a
video posted to YouTube repeatedly Tasering and striking
Porfirio Lopez with a baton as he lay in the street. Lopez was unarmed and posed no threat to the officers.
In October of 2013, Sheriff’s deputies in Santa Rosa, California shot
and killed a 13-year-old boy who was carrying a pellet gun. The boy,
Andy Lopez,
was walking down the sidewalk on his way to return the “low-powered,
air pellet gun” to a friend who he had borrowed it from. Before
realizing the gun was a toy, and despite having no reason to believe the
child was a threat, an officer shot him dead.
In 1968, Huey P. Newton
noted
that “the country cannot implement its racist program without the guns.
And the guns are the military and the police.” 45 years later, this
comment rings true. Institutions and lawmakers alone cannot carry out
racial and class-based oppression on their own – they need willing
participants. Domestically, police officers must become these willing
participants; and their psychological makeup, which is shaped by a
process of objectification and a prolonged internalization of “war
culture,” is crucial. On a global scale, this task is left to our
soldiers – working-class women and men who are routinely placed in
harm’s way for the wrong reasons, and many of whom suffer a compounded
and severe mental toll in the process.
The Mental Toll and Savagery of War
America’s “war culture” goes far beyond psychological preparation and
conditioning. Ultimately, and most significantly, it includes the
physical projection of this collective mentality. It includes, as social
commentator Joe Rogan simply
put it,
“sending these big metal machines that kill people” halfway across the
world. The young, working-class women and men (like myself) who become
the willing participants of this projection are the very products of
this conditioned mentality. As children, our inherent submission to
objectification and subsequent immersion into “war culture” makes this
possible.
Unfortunately, the effects of war are real. They are shocking. And
they are horrifying. The mental health effects on the participants of
these wars are vast, especially with regards to the modern battlefield.
Soldiers are returning to the US with a variety of such conditions –
most notably Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain
Injury (TBI), Depression, and Anxiety.
Dr. Deborah Warden, of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, noted in a
report for the
Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation
that elements specifically related to modern warfare have resulted in a
significant increase in head trauma-related injuries. Two major
factors in this development are technological advances in protective
equipment and a relative increase in “blast attacks.” “In the current
conflict, mortality has declined, and it is believed that this is
because of the advances in body armor worn by the military personnel,”
explains Dr. Warden. “With the high-quality body armor, individuals who
may have died in previous wars may survive with possible injuries to
extremities and head and neck.” In addition to this, “more TBI may be
occurring in the current war because of the frequency of explosive, or
blast attacks. Military sources report that approximately two thirds of
army war zone evacuations are due to blast,” and “88% of injuries seen
at second echelon treatment sites were due to blast.”
In a study conducted nearly six years after the beginning of the US
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was determined that, out of 1.64
million military service members who were deployed into these arenas,
“approximately 300,000 individuals currently suffer from PTSD or major
depression, and that
320,000 individuals
experienced a probable TBI during deployment.” Additionally, “about
one-third of those previously deployed have at least one of these three
conditions, and about 5 percent report symptoms of all three.” A
separate study found that “21 percent of active duty soldiers and 43
percent of reserve soldiers
developed symptoms significantly related to mental health disorders.”
According to another study:
15,204 soldiers who had completed their first deployment
participated in two questionnaires about their mental health and sleep
patterns from 2001 to 2008. During baseline questionnaires before
deployment, most soldiers did not have any psychiatric disorders or a
history of one. However, during follow-up questionnaires, 522 soldiers
had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 151 have anxiety, and 303
were depressed. Fifty percent of the soldiers studied reported
combat-related trauma and 17 percent reported having insomnia prior to
their deployment.”
The increase in mental illness among soldiers has been identified as
the main cause of increasing suicide rates. In 2012, the Army reported
that
325 suicides
occurred within its ranks — “Our highest on record,” according to Lt.
Gen. Howard Bromberg, deputy chief of staff, manpower and personnel for
the Army.
Naturally, within any arena of combat where young, impressionable
adults are moved around like pawns on a chessboard, human emotion runs
wild. Despite the robotic conditioning that occurs during basic
training, this chaotic environment has a tendency to penetrate the human
psyche, bringing about an extreme range of feelings, vexations,
actions, and reactions. Human beings are simply not equipped to handle
the terrors that accompany war — the sight of human corpses, charred and
mangled bodies, some of them children — in their totality. And coping
skills, whether inherent or forced, vary in effectiveness from person to
person. Unfortunately, some cope by internalizing the terror. In these
cases, we see the worst in humanity.
The infamous WikiLeaks
video
that leaked in 2010, showing “thirty-eight grisly minutes of US airmen
casually slaughtering a dozen Iraqis in 2007″ — including two Reuters
newsmen — puts this savagery into focus “not because it shows us
something we didn’t know, but because we can watch it unfold in real
time. Real people, flesh and blood, gunned down from above in a
hellish rain of fire.
The video footage, which immediately went viral, came on the heels of
the haunting images taken at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqi prisoners were
physically and sexually abused, tortured, raped, sodomized, and killed
by American and Iraqi soldiers.
Other such incidents were inevitable.
2010 was an especially gruesome year in Afghanistan. A February 12th
nighttime raid by U.S. Special Operations forces near Gardez
killed five people, including two pregnant women. Another
airstrike
by U.S. Special Operations forces helicopters on February 23 killed
more than 20 civilians and injured numerous others. Among the injured
was a 4-year-old boy who lost both of his legs. A few months later,
during a visit with the child at a hospital in Kabul, Afghan President
Hamid Karzai “scooped him up from his mattress and walked out to the
hospital courtyard,” and asked, “Who injured you?” as helicopters passed
overhead. “The boy, crying alongside his relatives, pointed at the
sky.” A few months later, in April, American troops “raked a large
passenger bus with gunfire” near Kandahar, Afghanistan,
killing 5 civilians and wounding 18.
In January of 2014, numerous photos showing US Marines
burning and looting
the dead bodies of Iraqi soldiers were obtained by the media. “Two of
the photos show a Marine apparently pouring a flammable liquid on two
bodies. Other shots show the remains on fire and, after the flames went
out, charred. A Marine in another photo is shown apparently rifling
through clothing amid one corpse’s skeletal remains. Another Marine is
shown posing in a crouch with his rifle pointing toward a human skull.”
Overall, more than a dozen bodies were shown in the photos, some of
which were covered with flies and one being eaten by a dog.
Considering the savagery that accompanies such an environment, it is
not difficult to see how undervalued human life becomes. The soldiers
who carry out, witness, or even hear of this brutality are almost
certain to suffer long-standing mental health effects. According to the
Department of Veterans Affairs website,
symptoms
of PTSD include “bad memories or nightmares” and “flashbacks”;
triggered and impulsive emotions; intense feelings of fear, guilt, or
shame; and “hyperarousal” – feeling jittery, paranoid, and “always on
the lookout for danger.”
The
effects of TBI
include numerous sensory problems, depression and anxiety, and severe
mood swings and/or aggressive behaviors, among many other things.
When all is said and done, and the politicians decide to bring them
home, the soldiers who are lucky enough to return in one physical piece
are often shattered into bits and fragments of mental and emotional
distress. Often times, these soldiers face limited options — one of the
most common of which is transitioning to a career in law enforcement.
From Fallujah to Philadelphia: Bringing the Wars Home
Police training mimics military training, both physically and
mentally. Transition programs that funnel soldiers to police forces have
become common at all levels of government. The changing face of law
enforcement is indicative of this process as forces that are
traditionally advertised to “protect and serve” have become noticeably
militaristic. Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that soldiers,
many of whom carry the mental baggage of war, are being streamlined from
the streets of Fallujah to the city blocks of the US.
In a recent
article
for “Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine,” Mark Clark tells us that
military veterans seeking employment in police ranks “is happening right
now in numbers unseen since the closing days of the Vietnam War.” To
assist with job placement and transitioning, organizations like “Hire
Heroes USA” works with “about 100 veterans each week” – at least 20% of
whom are seeking law enforcement jobs. Law enforcement agencies like the
Philadelphia Police Department and
San Jose
PD, which boast of being structured as “a paramilitary organization,”
actively seek military veterans by awarding preferential treatment. Many
police departments across the country have added increased incentives
and benefits, including the acceptance of military active duty time
towards retirement, to acquire veterans.
An October 2013
edition of the
Army Times
reports that “more than seven in 10 (local law enforcement agencies)
said they attend military-specific job fairs, and three quarters
reported developing relationships with the Labor Department’s local
veterans employment representatives.” Also, “Half said they work with
military transition assistance programs, and half also said they develop
relationships with local National Guard and reserve units.” Most local
departments also have some type of veterans hiring preference, and “more
than 90 percent reported having at least one vet in a senior leadership
position.”
An example of this trend can be found in Hillsborough County,
Florida, where the Sheriff’s department is seeking to hire “200 law
enforcement deputies and another 130 detention deputies,” and Major Alan
Hill has set his sights on veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to fill
these roles. Ironically, Hill points to “coping skills” as a main
reason. “A lot of them know how to operate under stress. All of them
know how to take orders,” Hill
said.
“We want to get the best of the best, and bring them in here, and give
them a home, and allow them to continue to serve.” Other departments
across the country — such as the City of Austin Police Department and
the Webb County Sheriff’s Office, both in Texas; the Denver Police
Department in Colorado; the Hillsborough County and Orange County
sheriff’s offices in Florida; and the Tucson Police Department in
Arizona — have initiated similar efforts.
The correlation between the mental baggage of war, the increased
hiring of military combat veterans as police officers, and an observable
escalation of aggressive and violent police brutality is difficult to
ignore. Police departments have screening processes, but many are
lacking. The lingering effects from being in a war zone are
unquestionable, and signs and symptoms which often are suppressed during
“downtimes” tend to surface and intensify under distress — a common
occurrence for police officers.
A 2006 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found
that “19 percent of the 912 police officers surveyed in the New Orleans
Police Department reported PTSD symptoms and 26 percent reported
symptoms of major depression.”
A 2008 report by the US Department of Justice concluded that “police
who have unresolved mental health concerns — whether or not those
concerns are associated with their combat-related experiences — are at
risk of harming themselves or others because of the nature of their
jobs.”
Furthermore, the “mental health effects of combat deployment can
manifest themselves in the daily activities of police work with more
severity than perhaps other lines of work.” Specifically, “Officers’
combat experiences can affect how they use their weapons, their
adherence to use-of-force policies, how they drive their police
vehicles, and how they treat citizens with whom they come into contact.”
Despite the potential dangers of these mental health effects, police
departments fail to adequately assess them during the evaluation and
hiring process. And even in cases where they are considered, the
presence of such conditions are either (1) intentionally hidden by
candidates, (2) undetectable due to their impulsive nature, or (3)
simply not considered a reasonable basis for disqualification.
Soldiers transitioning from military to civilian life will often mask
the psychological effects of combat out of fears of being stigmatized
or disqualified for employment. “Of those reporting a probable TBI,
57 percent had not been evaluated by a physician for brain injury.”
In a recent
study conducted at the
Naval Center for Combat and Operational Stress Control (COCS),
Kara Ballenger-Browning reported that “many of these soldiers are
self-conscious about the diagnosis.” In her findings, Ballenger-Browning
cited a poll where “half of Iraq/Afghanistan combat veterans with
suspected mental disorders believed that receiving treatment would harm
their careers; and another 65% stated that they would be considered weak
for seeking help and many were afraid that their peers would lose
confidence in their abilities.”
The study also focused on military-sponsored “soldier-to-civilian”
transition programs which sought to assist veterans with civilian job
placement. Within such programs, “anonymous questions about PTSD
treatment and future employment dominate online discussion forums, and
many erroneously assume and advise that outside agencies embrace a
‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.” Consequently, “these findings give
reason to believe that veterans may not seek treatment for PTSD, fearing
automatic disqualification from employment based on the diagnosis.”
Since the transition from soldier to police officer has become
commonplace, the COCS study included an assessment of the typical
candidate evaluation process used by police departments to determine how
or if the lingering mental health effects of combat would influence
hiring decisions. Information was gathered from a dozen random
departments throughout the US. The study found that:
- In each case, a psychological evaluation of the applicant was
required; however, a separate evaluation for PTSD was not typically
administered.
- The vast majority stated that a history of PTSD would not result in automatic disqualification.
- Although screening tools, such as the Clinician Administered PTSD
Scale (CAPS), exist to evaluate levels of PTSD severity, no law
enforcement agencies reported using one.
- In cases where mental health diagnoses were known, “most agencies
suggested that medication, including psychotropic medication, was
evaluated to ensure that safe and efficient job performance would not be
adversely affected.”
While many advocate groups view this lack of screening as a positive
thing — because it’s one less obstruction for veterans to face when
seeking employment with law enforcement — it should be concerning to
members of the communities that are subjected to the ill effects of
officers who suffer from combat-related conditions like PTSD or TBI.
“Despite the challenges faced by veterans leaving active-duty military
service for new or existing police careers,” lauds Clark, “the ranks of
police forces are swelling with veterans of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.”
Considering
that one-third of all soldiers returning from deployment suffer from
PTSD, TBI, some form of depressive disorder, or a combination of these,
it’s probable that many of these new recruits who are “swelling the
ranks” are bringing significant mental baggage with them.
The combination of this development with the standard process of
objectification and internalized oppression, as well as the ingrained
mentality of “war culture,” is a volatile one. Add the deliberate
militarization of domestic police forces to the mix and we have an
alarming trend — one that is highlighted by the near-daily occurrence of
indiscriminate police violence across the country.
The Evolution of Domestic Militarism
The militarization of America’s police forces has been a gradual
process which began as blowback from the cultural revolution of the
1960s. Radley Balko, an investigative journalist for the
Huffington Post,
has spent much of the past decade following this alarmingly fascistic
development. What Matt Taibbi is to the mortgage banking scandal, and
Jeremy Scahill is to US imperialism, Balko is to the militarization of
domestic law enforcement agencies. Likening modern police forces to a
“standing army,” Balko has made
compelling arguments
– using constitutional law and the 13th amendment, as well as deploying
a historical analysis extending back to old English law – that the mere
existence of these forces are unconstitutional.
“We got here by way of a number of political decisions and policies passed over 40 years,”
explains
Balko. “There was never a single law or policy that militarized our
police departments – so there was never really a public debate over
whether this was a good or bad thing.”
Over the course of several decades, Balko points to three main
developments that have led to this massive domestic militarization:
First, as a general response to the grassroots militancy of the
Cultural Revolution — which sought greater degrees of liberty, freedom,
and equality — police forces began borrowing from the “special forces”
model of the military. “They were largely a reaction to riots, violent
protest groups like the Black Panthers and Symbionese Liberation Army,
and a couple mass shooting incidents, like the Texas clock tower
massacre in 1966.” This led to the development and proliferation of SWAT
teams. “Darryl Gates started the first SWAT team in L.A. in 1969,”
explains Balko. “By 1975, there were 500 of them across the country.”
The second development was the “war on drugs,” which “overlapped” and
developed simultaneously with the reactive militarization of the late
’60s. Balko
captures
the vibe: “Nixon was declaring an ‘all-out war on drugs.’ He was
pushing policies like the no-knock raid, dehumanizing drug users and
dealers, and sending federal agents to storm private homes on raids that
were really more about headlines and photo-ops than diminishing the
supply of illicit drugs.” Shortly thereafter, with the arrival of
Reagan, “the two trends converged, and we started to see SWAT teams used
on an almost daily basis – mostly to serve drug warrants.”
Two decades later, domestic militarization reached new heights with
the third development in this evolution: The World Trade Center attacks
of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Broadening the “war on drugs” to include an
all-encompassing and often-times ambiguous “war on terror” opened the
door for massive increases in “domestic security measures,” which led to
seemingly limitless funding of police forces, the creation of new
“security” agencies such as Homeland Security, and the opportunity for
millions of dollars of profit to be made through the privatization of
these services.
Private corporations like
G4S Secure Solutions (formerly “The Wackenhut Corporation”), mimicking their international counterparts like
Academi (formerly “Xe Services” and originally “
Blackwater“), jumped at the chance to secure government contracts (including
US Customs and Border Protection)
and boost revenue. The creation of a “police industrial complex” has
allowed companies like these to benefit from a “business to business
global security market that is estimated to
generate revenues
of up to $14.9 billion per year” while being heavily subsidized by
government contracts. As a complementary development, the privatization
of prisons works hand in hand with this newly-found,
multi-billion-dollar law enforcement industry by creating even more
incentive to seek out arrests and incarcerations.
“Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and
local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created
for overseas combat theaters.” In an ongoing
study
by the ACLU, which is awaiting responses to “over 260 public records
requests with law enforcement agencies in 25 states,” enough discernable
evidence has been gathered to determine that “the use of military
machinery such as tanks and grenades, as well as counter-terrorism
tactics, encourage overly aggressive policing – too often with
devastating consequences.” The study highlights random developments
across the country:
- A county sheriff’s department in South Carolina has an armored
personnel carrier dubbed “The Peacemaker,” which can shoot weapons that
the U.S. military specifically refrains from using on people.
- New Hampshire police received federal funds for a counter-attack vehicle, asking “what red-blooded American cop isn’t going to be excited about getting a toy like this?”
- Police in North Dakota borrowed a $154 million Predator drone from Homeland Security to arrest a family who refused to return six cows that wandered onto their farm.
- Two SWAT Teams shut down a neighborhood in Colorado for four hours to search for a man suspected of stealing a bicycle and merchandise from Wal-Mart.
- Police in Arkansas announced plans to patrol streets wearing full SWAT gear and carrying AR-15 assault rifles.
Furthermore, during a 2007 House subcommittee hearing, Balko
reported a
“1,500% increase in the use of SWAT teams over the last two decades.”
Today, in America, “SWAT teams violently smash into private homes
more than 100 times per day.”
The equipment and machinery regularly utilized by local police forces
across the US now mimics that of a war zone. They possess everything
from body armor to high-powered weaponry to tanks, armored vehicles, and
even drones. But why? Are the duties of police officers really as
dangerous as they’re made out to be? Out of approximately 900,000 police
officers in the US, there are roughly 150 fatalities per year. Nearly
100 of these fatalities are accidental; therefore, 50 out of 900,000
officers — or 1 out of every 18,000 (five hundred thousandths of one
percent of the entire force) — are ‘maliciously’ killed each year.
The
odds of being struck by lightning
over the course of a lifetime are 1 in 3,000. Yet police are armed to
the teeth — a fact that suggests conscious shifts from “defense” to
“offense” and “protecting and serving” to “confronting and repressing.”
Citizens — most notably poor, working class, and people of color — who
are intended to be the beneficiaries of this “protective service” are
now viewed and treated as enemy combatants on a battlefield.
Coming Home to Roost
It was, as I saw it, a case of ‘the chickens coming home
to roost.’ I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the
killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread
unchecked, had finally struck down this country’s Chief Magistrate.
— Malcolm X, explaining his “chickens” quote
America’s culture of war and violence was bound to catch up to all of
us. Over the past decade, yearly US military expenditures more than
doubled from a little over $300 billion in 2001 to over $682 billion in
2013.
,
US military spending represents 39% of global spending — more than the
combined spending of China, Russia, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi
Arabia, Germany, India, Italy, Canada, and Australia. Since 1945, the
US military has invaded, intervened in, or occupied, at least 50
countries.
Currently, the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military
bases worldwide, a list that includes locations in 63 countries. In
addition to these bases, there are 255,065 US military personnel
deployed in 156 countries worldwide.
This global military presence has real and often disastrous consequences for human life. In the 2011 book,
The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars,
author John Tirman estimates that “between six and seven million people
died in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians.”
However, wartime casualties pale in comparison to the lingering
effects, chaos, and disorder stemming from prolonged military
occupations. “In the period 1950-2005, there have been 82 million
avoidable deaths from deprivation (avoidable mortality, excess deaths,
excess mortality, deaths that did not have to happen) associated with
countries occupied by the US in the post-1945 era.
While it’s difficult to gauge how much of a role the military
occupations played in this devastation, it’s safe to assume the
instability created by such occupations factor significantly.
The violence that is perpetrated abroad mimics the violent culture at home. As of June 2013, it’s estimated that there are
up to 310 million guns
in the US, which amounts to just about one gun per person (the US
population is 314 million). The next highest number of guns per capita
by country is Serbia at 58% and Yemen at 55%, compared to the US at
90%.
Since 1968, there have been 1,384,171 gunfire deaths in the US — which
amounts to more American deaths than from all of the US wars in the
nation’s history combined (1,171,177).
The US averages 10.2 “firearm-related deaths” per every 100,000 people.
Americans are 10 times more likely to suffer gun-related deaths than
people in Australia and Ireland; 15 times more likely than people in
Turkey; 40 times more likely than those in England; and 170 times more
likely than those in Japan.
America’s police forces also reflect this culture. And while law
enforcement agencies across the US have delivered pain and devastation
to poorer, inner-city communities for nearly a half-century, their
militarization has only recently begun to attract national attention.
Much of this attention can be pinpointed to the Occupy Wall Street
movement and the response it received from police, which included
unadulterated brutality against peaceful protesters, unnecessary use of
force, and the negligent use of tasers and Oleoresin Capsicum (pepper)
spray — a substance that has been
proven
to cause “adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects,
including arrhythmias and even sudden death” in some cases. However, it
was not merely these careless and sadistic actions which have attracted
such attention, but rather the changing profile of the victims of this
brutality: young, white, “middle-class” women and men.
“For 25 years, the primary ‘beneficiaries’ of police militarization
have been poor people in high-crime areas — people who generally haven’t
had the power or platform to speak up,”
explains
Balko. “The Occupy protesters were largely affluent, white, and deft at
using cell phones and social media to document and publicize incidents
of excessive force.” Their public victimization, despite falling far
short of the police brutality that has existed within communities of
color for decades, inevitably struck a chord with a nation still
inundated with white supremacist ideals that assign varying degrees of
value to American lives — mainly based on the color of one’s skin and
their socioeconomic background. Ultimately, white members of the media,
seeing reflections of their own sons and daughters being abused,
suddenly chose to report en masse. White viewers, seeing reflections of
their neighbors and relatives, suddenly expressed widespread disgust.
This was no longer an episode of COPS, “glamorizing controversial police
tactics” and perpetuating “implicit biases regarding race and class.”
These were now
white, middle-class lives being affected and brutalized.
Essentially, the hate that Malcolm X spoke of, historically reserved
for “defenseless black people,” is now developing into indiscriminate
rage — targeting poor and working-class people of all colors throughout
the US. Through this ongoing process, it is becoming apparent that even
white privilege, in itself, is beginning to lose its immunity from this
unaccountable wrath.
The 2011 beating of a homeless schizophrenic man,
Kelly Thomas,
in a transit parking lot in Fullerton, California confirmed this wrath.
The incident was, unbeknown to officers, recorded by security cameras
on the night of July 5, 2011, and later viewed by millions of Americans
as the officers’ trial was closely followed. Thomas was unarmed and
posed no threat at the time of the beating. “The surveillance camera
footage shows Thomas being beaten, clubbed and stunned with a Taser by
police.” Thomas suffered a coma and died five days later in a hospital
bed.
November of 2011 showcased yet another incident of blatant disregard as a police officer doused
UC-Davis students
with streams of pepper spray. At the time, the students were engaged in
non-violent protest by sitting together with their arms locked. Video
footage of the officer calmly and methodically walking up and down the
line of students, spraying in and around their faces without pause,
epitomized the sadistic nature of modern policing.
On August 10, 2013, Tallahassee police officers, while conducting a field sobriety test on 44-year-old
Christina West,
forcefully slammed her face-first into the road as one officer screamed
in rage. While obviously inebriated, Ms. West was subjected to what
City Commissioner Scott Maddox later described as “a disturbing use of
force against a completely non-aggressive arrestee.”
In September of 2013, 20-year-old
David Connor Castellani was arrested, beaten by
police,
and attacked by a K-9 unit after a verbal altercation outside of an
Atlantic City casino. Castellani was unarmed. The following month, after
a disagreement with his father over cigarettes, 19-year-old
Tyler Comstock found
himself the target of a police chase in Iowa. Despite being told to
“back off” in order to defuse the situation, officers escalated the
incident by pursuing Comstock, crashing into the truck he was driving,
and shooting and killing him. He was unarmed.
In January of 2014, a 2009
surveillance video
from a Seabrook, New Hampshire police station was leaked, showing
police slamming Mike Bergeron face-first into a concrete wall and
dousing him with pepper spray while he was on the floor. Bergeron was
arrested under suspicion of drunk driving and was unarmed, handcuffed,
and relatively calm when one officer decided to violently slam his face
into the wall, to the apparent joy of the other officers who could be
seen laughing.
Incidents like these and many others have signified the donning of a
new age — one that is eerily reminiscent of authoritarian societies gone
by, draped with violently oppressive, daily interactions between agents
of government and the citizenry, and dripping of fascistic notions
built upon a culture of militarism and war. A violence historically
reserved for the most disenfranchised of the population — and ignored by
most of the rest — is finally extending itself beyond the oppressive
structures of old, transcending targeted demographics to include a
working-class-wide assault.
Conclusion
An
extensive 2006 report by the
United Nations Human Rights Committee
concluded that, in the United States, the War on Terror has “created a
generalized climate of impunity for law enforcement officers, and
contributed to the erosion of what few accountability mechanisms exist
for civilian control over law enforcement agencies. As a result, police
brutality and abuse persist unabated and undeterred across the country.”
“For 30 years, politicians and public officials have been arming,
training, and dressing cops as if they’re fighting a war,”
explains
Balko. “They’ve been dehumanizing drug offenders and criminal suspects
as the enemy. And of course they’ve explicitly and repeatedly told them
they’re fighting a war. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that a lot
of cops have started to believe it.”
This development, while unwanted, was inevitable for a nation that
was built on a foundation of Native American genocide, African
enslavement, the ruthlessness of capitalism, a culture of misogyny, and
persistent strains of racism and classism. The process of
objectification which has become pervasive for America’s youth has
served as an expedient catalyst to a culture of war and oppression; and
the insidious victimization of America’s working class has worked in
tandem with the internalization of this oppressive culture, producing
willing participants eager to earn a place in the
master’s good graces by brutalizing their working class peers.
As products of this conditioning, the mindset of the modern police
officer in the US remains peculiar. As individuals, within the confines
of their own lives — amongst their families, loved ones, children, and
friends — they aren’t much different than many of us. Ironically,
despite being enforcers of government policy in their professional
capacity, many do not hesitate to jump on the soapbox of anti-government
rhetoric — often opposing things like Obamacare, welfare, gun control,
open immigration policy, and even taxation — on their “personal time.”
Right-wing fringe groups like the Tea Party and
Oath Keepers
have actively recruited both military personnel and police officers,
finding an abundance of narrow and impressionably ripe minds within
these ranks. While claiming to “return to the basics” and “serve the US
Constitution,” their actions (even when serving their “public” duties)
ultimately rely on literal interpretations of a highly-subjective, often
vague, and antiquated document that was written by wealthy, white (some
slave-owning) landowners nearly 250 years ago.
Naturally, these interpretations are skewed by a myriad of
privileges. Regardless of the officer’s own ethnicity or socioeconomic
background, it is the
role that ultimately represents a virtual
arm of white supremacy and class oppression. Regarding the racist
dynamics of law enforcement in the US, “It’s useful to understand this
as an allegory about how white skin privilege works,” explains Annalee
Newitz. “The police uniform (and) the badge are like white skin, and the
person who wears that skin is allowed to enforce laws which he doesn’t
himself intend to follow.”
Within their roles as “officers of the law,” they become the embodiment
of the government-backed suppression they often despise in their
private lives. Only the suppression they carry out is against a specific
target population (people of color, the poor and disenfranchised, and
the working class). And, despite coming from that very working class,
they undoubtedly lose any and all sense of class consciousness in their
roles as ruling class watchdogs.
Within this role, they take ownership of a wide array of hypocritical
entitlements – a mindset that wholeheartedly believes the US
Constitution protects
my rights to own guns, and
my rights to protect my privileged status in society, and
my rights to protect my property, and so on. However, those rights don’t apply to
you.
And they certainly don’t apply to young men of color who happen to be
walking home at night. Nor do they apply to striking workers demanding a
living wage. Nor do they apply to Occupy protestors collectively
sitting in protest of illegal wars, corporate greed, and corrupt banks.
Nor do they apply to evicted homeowners who were exploited by deceitful
mortgage schemes. Nor do they apply to homeless people who are simply
trying to survive on the streets.
Rather than seeing themselves as public servants, police officers
have increasingly embraced the “us vs. them” mentality: anyone who isn’t
a cop is a potential threat. In doing so, they have become “mindless
drones” void of any conscience amidst a world that is becoming
increasingly unconscionable: the ultimate tool on an ever-intensifying
class-war landscape. The collective baggage they bring with them —
products of objectification, war culture, militarism, and combat-induced
mental illness — serve as positive attributes in the eyes of those who
use them as tools of oppression, while representing erratic triggers of
violence to everyone else. The war has come home. The chickens are here
to roost.
This article was posted on Thursday, February 27th, 2014 at 3:43pm and is filed under
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