RBG and RW have convincingly shown that this situation with the US military is of the first importance to all Americans, and that controlling it will continue to be a struggle. This discussion in turn raises the fact that there are more than 800,000 police officers in the US (a significant fraction of the number of people in the US mil…
RBG and RW have convincingly shown that this situation with the US military is of the first importance to all Americans, and that controlling it will continue to be a struggle. This discussion in turn raises the fact that there are more than 800,000 police officers in the US (a significant fraction of the number of people in the US military), who serve in roughly 10,000 to 20,000 police agencies (which seems to me a staggering number). The problems endemic to these paramilitary organizations have become familiar: lack of adequate screening and training; infiltration by extremists; individual, cultural, and institutional racism; indiscriminate (but targeted) and unaccountable and often lethal brutality; militarization—in equipment, operating procedure, and mentality—developed to the point that in marginalized communities the police are often effectively indistinguishable from armies of hostile occupation; the legal and institutional enabling of abuse by means of no-knock warrants, civil forfeiture, qualified immunity, bail beyond the means of the poor, arbitrary and unreasonable fines, together with imprisonment and often job loss, for the inability to pay arbitrary and unreasonable fines; and on and on. With all this dysfunctionality, the police are also one of the pumps in America’s auction-block-to-cell block pipeline (which incarcerates one-fourth of the world’s prisoners), making it possible for the corporate oligarchy to put the otherwise unproductive underclass to economic use to enrich their thoroughly privatized prison-industrial complex with an updated and far more sophisticated form of plantation labor. What do the American police have to do with the current threat to democracy in America? First, this threat did not arise solely at the level of presidents, generals, and police chiefs. It incubates at the level of communities, local organizations, and individuals. Second, policing in America (in contrast to many other countries) is completely decentralized. There are municipal, county, state, and federal police agencies (not to mention innumerable private security forces). Many federal agencies almost no one has ever heard of have their own police agencies. Merely reading about the vast corpus of the American police, and the extremely various characteristics of its constituent parts, is bewildering. What this situation collectively produces is chillingly epitomized by the acronym “ICE,” and the phrase “Portland 2020.” Police forces in America constitute a vast and varied brownshirt-blackshirt recruiting ground for would-be twenty-first century American fascists. There are journalists and scholars who have studied this issue. It would be a valuable service for RBG to do an interview with one of them.
RBG and RW have convincingly shown that this situation with the US military is of the first importance to all Americans, and that controlling it will continue to be a struggle. This discussion in turn raises the fact that there are more than 800,000 police officers in the US (a significant fraction of the number of people in the US military), who serve in roughly 10,000 to 20,000 police agencies (which seems to me a staggering number). The problems endemic to these paramilitary organizations have become familiar: lack of adequate screening and training; infiltration by extremists; individual, cultural, and institutional racism; indiscriminate (but targeted) and unaccountable and often lethal brutality; militarization—in equipment, operating procedure, and mentality—developed to the point that in marginalized communities the police are often effectively indistinguishable from armies of hostile occupation; the legal and institutional enabling of abuse by means of no-knock warrants, civil forfeiture, qualified immunity, bail beyond the means of the poor, arbitrary and unreasonable fines, together with imprisonment and often job loss, for the inability to pay arbitrary and unreasonable fines; and on and on. With all this dysfunctionality, the police are also one of the pumps in America’s auction-block-to-cell block pipeline (which incarcerates one-fourth of the world’s prisoners), making it possible for the corporate oligarchy to put the otherwise unproductive underclass to economic use to enrich their thoroughly privatized prison-industrial complex with an updated and far more sophisticated form of plantation labor. What do the American police have to do with the current threat to democracy in America? First, this threat did not arise solely at the level of presidents, generals, and police chiefs. It incubates at the level of communities, local organizations, and individuals. Second, policing in America (in contrast to many other countries) is completely decentralized. There are municipal, county, state, and federal police agencies (not to mention innumerable private security forces). Many federal agencies almost no one has ever heard of have their own police agencies. Merely reading about the vast corpus of the American police, and the extremely various characteristics of its constituent parts, is bewildering. What this situation collectively produces is chillingly epitomized by the acronym “ICE,” and the phrase “Portland 2020.” Police forces in America constitute a vast and varied brownshirt-blackshirt recruiting ground for would-be twenty-first century American fascists. There are journalists and scholars who have studied this issue. It would be a valuable service for RBG to do an interview with one of them.
Tens of millions of “not so good” guys with guns; great analysis, Alexander