The Militarization of U.S. Police Departments
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to just everywhere.” We should all be cognizant of King’s quote. In the 20th and 21rst centuries, U.S. policies around the world, both economically and militarily, have been questionable at best. They started with the Philippines in the beginning of the 20th century up to the Middle East today. These policies, more often incredibly violent, are coming back to haunt us. An example of this includes the U.S. international policy of “Low-Intensity Conflict” (LIC).
The U.S. launched LIC at the beginning of the century in its Philippine colony in 1901 with the creation of the Philippine Constabulary. The Philippine Constabulary is, even today, a national police organization created principally to protect American and Filipino elite interests. The legacy of this policy is that it now serves as a model for a militarized policing system in our 21rst century domestic American life.
The U.S. government and its elite tend to try out policies internationally before introducing them into the U.S. I generally define the “elite” as neoconservative and neoliberal economic proponents along with their corporate capitalist supporters and colleagues. As in the Philippines, these U.S. elite want to control Americans. They don’t want opposition to their policies, pure and simple.
Often the U.S. elite are constrained in implementing the policies domestically, due to laws that prevent this. They then will try to circumvent the restricting laws or attempt to overturn them. There has been a similar pattern with economic policies as with structural adjustment economic initiatives internationally by the IMF and World Bank and now neoliberal privatization in the U.S. itself. This is mostly thanks to Congress overturning, for example, the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 (Crawford) and politicians and government agencies allowing for the privatization of many of our formerly “public” institutions (Gray).
Constraints on Militarization in the United States
Not long after the end of the Civil War, in 1865, the United States government sent federal troops to the South to enforce the policies of the reconstruction period:
Reconstruction addressed how the eleven seceding states would regain what the Constitution calls a “republican form of government” and be reseated in Congress, the civil status of the former leaders of the Confederacy, and the Constitutional and legal status of freedmen, especially their civil rights and whether they should be given the right to vote. Intense controversy erupted throughout the South over these issues….Congress removed civilian governments in the South in 1867 and put the former Confederacy under the rule of the U.S. Army. The army conducted new elections in which the freed slaves could vote, while whites who had held leading positions under the Confederacy were...CounterPunch’s Top Stories