poipoipoi-2016:

kontextmaschine:

So everyone’s talking about the militarization of police. Now Radley Balko’s been on this beat for years, but the ironic thing about everyone suddenly bringing it up keying off the Ferguson stuff is that that’s actually the least radically unprecedented manifestation of this tendency.

Historically speaking, it’s completely typical for American governments to respond to mass protest and civic unrest (esp. racialized unrest) by invading and conquering affected areas by main force, employing forces trained for that purpose and equipped with weapons and vehicles acquired by the regular Army for its last war and then passed on as surplus.

It’s just that up until the 1970s (and the National Guard’s post-Vietnam integration with the regular Army) state militias filled this role. Civil unrest and its pacification isn’t so much a matter of law but meta-law, which is to say war - conflict between two forces to determine which shall hold authority in the affected territory. And maintaining distinct forces for law enforcement and domestic war had several advantages over the present system.

For one, this precluded the use of militarized force for situations like serving warrants that couldn’t plausibly be counted as “civic unrest” even if you squint at them hard.

For two, militia are less likely than police to be involved in the inciting incidents behind civil unrest. This distance meant the militia didn’t take unrest personally and in turn their pacification activities were regarded as more legitimate - this is why even in the post-Vietnam era, the National Guard was used to pacify the 1992 LA riots, the LAPD being poorly suited to calm an anti-LAPD action. (Also after Iraq War I, the real modern overseas Guard debut, the domestically oriented elements of the Guard wanted to reassert themselves, and the Guard as a whole wanted to prove their utility in the face of post-Cold War drawdowns).

For three, this raised the costs of resolution by force - “militia conducts operation locally” was big news and to happen at all, let alone regularly, indicated a failure of normal processes, creating pressure for local authorities to resolve situations by other means. By contrast, “police conduct operation locally” is pretty dog-bites-man as news goes.

So, going forward, if you want to do something to reduce government violence against the public, you should seriously consider reestablishing a military force devoted to the sole purpose of conducting domestic war against American citizens.

14 August 2014