Police Militarization : The Horrors of the US policing forces and what we should do to stop it

For years, the US has used the police within the US as a method of militarizing communities that are seen as threats. This includes black communities, Arabic people, Hispanic communities, and an array of different non-white areas. Through programs like 1033, Africom, and the DHS giving billions of dollars of military-grade equipment and spending money to local police departments, the USFG has strategically colonized the very people that live within the US. This is a form of subtle colonization, but it is not subtle in the action of colonizing, but rather in the way that grammars and discourse of actions like this are forwarded by the US government, but also the media, our education, our propaganda, and education sources as a whole. For example, people like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson call protesters thugs and looters rather than understanding the nature of the protest. This creates the discourse in which society designates black people as threats to society. This is not reserved for only black people, but also for “Mexican drug dealers” or “Arabic terrorists.” This logic is used by the United States Federal Government on an international spector in order to securitize and militarise areas like the Middle East, South America, and Asia. Specifically, we are the ones who first gave weapons to Osama Bin Laden and Saudi Arabia who were “responsible” for 9–11. We still give weapons to Saudi Arabia and these weapons are used to commit mass genocide in the country of Yemen. We were partially responsible for the coup de’ tat in Honduras which overthrew the government of Honduras in order to bring power to the people. Within days, the person we appointed in charge of Honduras used our weapons to kill innocent civilians on the street, and Honduras returned to its state of consistent terror with the weapons that we still sell to them. This form of international militarization is the same logics and grammars which are used to militarize communities within the USA. For example, the 1033 program gave military weapons and tanks to local police departments. These tanks were then used to patrol in Ferguson, a city in Missouri with 20,000 people because of protests. The United States uses its military-industrial complex and the discourse forwarded by it in order to militarize police departments and prepare them for the “threats” of “black gangbangers” or “Hispanic drug dealers.” A study by Jonathon Mummolo regarding the militarization of police departments within the US shows that this very militarization saves a few 100 police lives a year. There are over a million officers. At the same time, police militarization focuses on low-income minority communities (usually black or Hispanic communities). This causes a plethora of deaths every year due to the police training that centers blackness or poverty as a threat and something that needs to be stopped with guns. The study shows that leaders of departments believe that they have the moral obligation to militarize local low-income communities. This is a clear example of the level of police militarization that happens in non-white communities in the US.

We have come to the point where we can conclude that police militarization is inherently bad. It saves less than 1000 lives a year while causing the deaths of people like Philando Castile, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many more innocent people that were killed based on their race, income, or their level of “threat to society.” However we must ask the question, what does it mean to demilitarize what does that look like? What does that do to improve material conditions? Demilitarization can mean many different things but as per my view of what should happen, the police forces of the USA should lose all lethal and non lethal weapons. For me, the end goal is abolition of the prisons and policing systems that continue the carcerality of the state, and hopefully a complete revolution that reorganizes the method of governing society.

For more info on the Princeton Study, click this link https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/police-militarization-fails-to-protect-officers-and-targets-black-communities-study-finds