The recent killing of Alex Pretti by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents in Minneapolis has generated a new wave of fury on the part of Americans upset about the mounting abuses that federal law enforcement personnel are committing. The alarm is fully warranted. ICE, the FBI, and other government entities increasingly both look and behave like ruthless military combat units. Unfortunately, too many people who are alarmed about the recent incidents seem to believe that the problem originated with Donald Trump’s presidency and that removing him from that post would end the ominous threat to civil liberties.
That belief is delusional. The dangerous militarization of law enforcement agencies and the corresponding contempt for constitutional rights that those agencies exhibit began many decades ago and the situation has inexorably worsened over that long period. We have witnessed the corrosive process take place with both Democrats and Republicans in the White House. Placing the entire blame on Trump is akin to misdiagnosing a life-threatening medical condition as a sudden heart attack when it actually is an insidious stage 3 cancer that has been entrenching itself for years.
There is still time to leash (or abolish) rogue law enforcement agencies and enable America’s democratic constitutional system to stage a recovery. But that outcome will require the American people to face some painful truths about both U.S. foreign and domestic policies.
There should always be a sharp distinction between the function of the U.S. military and that of domestic law enforcement entities. The rationale for the former is to defeat a designated enemy and eliminate a national security threat. To accomplish that task means sometimes having to “kill people and break things,” as several cynics have noted. The mandate for police personnel is supposed to be very different. Their function should be to protect the life, liberty, and property of people residing in the United States by apprehending criminals who violate those rights.
Unfortunately, those very different missions have become dangerously conflated in recent decades. The unpleasant reality is that the U.S. military has always treated designated enemies in a harsh, uncompromising fashion throughout the country’s history. Throughout Washington’s multiple wars of choice waged since World War II, U.S. forces frequently have treated “enemy” civilian populations in an appallingly brutal fashion. From the Korean “police action” in the early 1950s to the U.S. military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere, Washington’s human rights abuses are legendary. In a perverse and poignant fashion, U.S. imperial policy has now come home to roost.
Another key development that blurred the previously sharp distinction between foreign warfare and domestic law enforcement was the provision of surplus military hardware to police departments beginning in the 1980s. That aspect became even more important in 1990 with the expansion of the Pentagon’s 1033 program. It enabled local and state police departments to obtain sophisticated, heavy-duty weaponry and equipment at bargain prices – sometimes even for free. The new federal largesse led to an acquisition frenzy.
With Washington’s subsidies, the number of SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) programs ballooned throughout the United States. SWAT and other police personnel also increasingly became nearly indistinguishable from heavily armed combat units in the Army or Marines. Worse, such ostensibly civilian police often behaved like hardened combat troops, treating suspects and sometimes onlookers as the equivalent of enemy troops in wartime. The tendency became even more pronounced when police units in American towns and cities underwent training from hardened foreign police or military establishments, including Israel’s notoriously heavy-handed security forces.
Even bystanders who dared to record police conduct were considered hostile elements and treated as menacing adversaries, not fellow citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. That attitude has become pervasive, and it appeared to be especially relevant to ICE’s killing of Alex Pretti, who was using his cell phone to record the actions of agents.
The militarization process has inexorably infected a wide range of law enforcement entities, federal, state, and local. ICE has proven especially corruptible. That agency’s behavior epitomizes the growing mentality in the U.S. law enforcement system of viewing ordinary civilians not as people to be protected and served, but as potential enemies to be punished and neutralized.
That poisonous mentality did not begin with the Trump administration, and it will not end automatically when he leaves office. The brutal handling of the incidents at Ruby Ridge and Waco in the 1990s were earlier warning signals that went unheeded. In both cases, federal authorities treated the designated suspects not as American citizens, albeit with eccentric and extreme views, but as terrorists posing a dire threat to the country.
The raids also were conducted with callous indifference about the fate of innocent parties. Just as the killings of Pretti and Renee Good should enrage people today, the sight of Vicki Weaver being killed by an federal sniper during the August 1992 Ruby Ridge altercation as she held her infant daughter in her arms should have disgusted any decent human being. The incineration of 76 civilians, including children, during the April 1993 FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, also epitomized the toxic, militarized mentality of dismissing the killing of civilian adversaries as an unfortunate tragedy that the victims brought on themselves. Unfortunately, the public’s outrage regarding both of those episodes was surprisingly limited. Such indifference helped pave the way for the current abuses.
Two crucial steps need to be taken. One is to emphatically reverse the militarization of police. SWAT units and similar entities under whatever names and bureaucratic structures that exist should be disbanded. Americans managed to enforce the law quite successfully without the existence of such outfits for the first two centuries of our country’s independence, and we can do so again. All law enforcement personnel should be unmasked, lightly armed, and not draped in combat gear and weaponry.
Equally important, the militaristic mentality that has taken root in law enforcement agencies throughout the country must be eradicated. That task will require extensive retraining of current police personnel and a major re-orientation of future training programs for incoming recruits. Among other changes, such reforms mean regarding military combat experience as a potential negative, not a positive, characteristic for applicants wanting to join police forces.
Without such vital policy and structural changes, the menace to America’s democratic constitutional system will persist and likely increase no matter who sits in the oval office.
Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.
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