[News] A Brief History of the ''War on Cops'': The False Allegation That Enables Police Violence
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Thu Jul 21 17:07:15 EDT 2016
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36930-a-brief-history-of-the-war-on-cops-the-false-allegation-that-enables-police-violence
A Brief History of the ''War on Cops'': The False Allegation That
Enables Police Violence
Dan Berger - July 21, 2016
As part of a global action proclaiming "Freedom Now,
<http://freedomnow.movementforblacklives.org/>" Black Lives Matter
groups shut down police operations around the country on July 20. From
Oakland to Washington, D.C., New York City to Chicago and Detroit, these
bold and creative acts of civil disobedience issued a demand to "Fund
Black Futures." Protests in New York shut down
<http://www.villagevoice.com/news/ten-arrested-after-activists-block-entrance-to-police-unions-headquarters-8882412>the
Patrolmen's Benevolent Association while those in D.C. closed
<http://byp100.org/byp100-dc-and-blm-dc-shutdown-national-fraternal-order-of-police/>
the National Fraternal Order of Police office for the day.
These protests, which promise to continue, call attention to the routine
police murders of Black women, men, and children. Further, especially in
targeting the police unions, these protests challenge the false idea
that there is a "war on cops."
Numerous sources
<http://reason.com/blog/2016/07/19/there-is-still-no-war-on-cops>
confirm that there is no such war. Last year was one of the safest on
record <http://www.newsweek.com/it-has-never-been-safer-be-cop-372025>
for police officers, and even with the targeted killings in Dallas and
Baton Rouge, being a police officer does not rate
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-fleetwood/how-dangerous-is-police-w_b_6373798.html>
as one of the 10 most dangerous jobs in the country. It is far less
dangerous than logging, fishing, or roofing.
Yet, conservative commentators routinely sound the alarm against a "war
on cops." This claim surfaces not only in those rare instances when an
officer is killed but also anytime people challenge police violence or
authority. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who first rose to
prominence as a tough-on-crime US attorney, has made a career of
decrying nonexistent wars on police. So it was no surprise that he has
found a new calling in politics: declaring
<http://www.mediaite.com/online/rudy-giuliani-black-lives-matter-puts-a-target-on-police-officers-backs/>
Black Lives Matter to be the latest example of that specious confrontation.
People are not at war with police. But police are at war with people.
For more than 50 years, the "war on cops" story has provided both public
support and material resources for the war that metropolitan police
departments have waged on mostly poor Black, Brown and Indigenous
communities. The "war on cops" may be an old story, but it is a useful one.
In fact, the "war on cops" narrative helps explain how the United States
ended up with a police force that functions like a series of military
battalions. The idea behind the "war on cops" treats police like
soldiers: going into battle every day, serving as symbols of their
country with the overriding objective of winning the war (on crime,
drugs, or terrorism) at all costs.
The idea of a "war on cops" owes to the savvy responses police officials
offered to the insurgencies of the 1960s. Police seized upon the
political upheaval of that time to advocate for greater authority and
resources. They understood, as Nina Burgess -- a character in Marlon
James's award-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings -- did
the sectarian violence in 1970s Jamaica, "If you don't live politics,
politics will live you." Powerful groups like the police enlist people
to support them or risk annihilation. Around the country, police
officers used these tumultuous events to argue for more: more money,
more weapons, more officers and more authority.
During the urban unrest of the mid-1960s, which were often sparked by
incidents of police violence against Black or Latino men, police
routinely claimed to be at war in American cities. After the Watts
neighborhood erupted in 1965, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
created the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Team, an elite and highly
militarized police unit. Its first assignment came in an assault on the
Los Angeles Black Panther office
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/us/the-rise-of-the-swat-team-in-american-policing.html>
four years later. As police departments around the country developed
their own SWAT teams, they became routine components of the war on drugs
in the 1980s and 1990s.
Often in these urban conflicts, police said snipers fired upon them.
Unable to determine the source of some gunfire during the 1967 uprising
in Detroit, police and National Guard claimed to be under attack by
snipers. Such reports led a handful of police officers, state troopers,
and National Guardsmen to seize the Algiers Motel
<https://www.amazon.com/Algiers-Motel-Incident-John-Hersey/dp/0801857775>.
They found no snipers but killed three Black men and beat nine other
people -- seven Black men, two white women -- in the process. (Similar
unsubstantiated reports of sniper fire during Hurricane Katrina in 2005
led police <http://pun.sagepub.com/content/11/4/491.short> to scale back
on rescue efforts in favor of greater policing.)
Some city police departments seized upon the deepening economic crises
of the 1970s to develop undercover paramilitary forces. As historian
Elizabeth Hinton describes in her new book, From the War on Poverty to
War on Crime
<http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737235>, the Detroit
and Los Angeles police departments created secretive police units that
waged brutal undercover operations against low-income Black communities.
Designed as elite shock troops in the war on crime, the LAPD's Community
Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) and Detroit's Stop the
Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS) functioned as urban mercenaries.
"In just two years, STRESS made more than 6,000 arrests and killed
eighteen civilians and suspects," Hinton writes. "Of those killed, all
but one were Black."
Police unions have been the central institution promoting the idea of a
war on police. The first to defend cops who kill civilians, police
unions have for decades declared that they are under attack. Cynical and
racist as such declarations
<http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28593-blood-on-their-hands-the-racist-history-of-modern-police-unions>
may be, they have worked. Take a look at New York City, the country's
largest police department with a storied history of abuse. Describing
police beating up children in 1964, author James Baldwin wrote
<https://www.thenation.com/article/report-occupied-territory/> that
"Harlem is policed like an occupied territory." The Patrolmen's
Benevolent Association (PBA), the labor union representing members of
the New York City Police Department (NYPD), has defended police violence
and argued for greater weaponry to carry it out.
The PBA's influence increased throughout the 1970s as it advocated for
wartime policing. After four officers were killed in two days in May
1971, the PBA called for officers to carry shotguns as well as pistols.
While the claim was derided for being shrill, the proliferation of
SWAT-style policing meant that new hardware flowed to major police
departments at an unprecedented scale.
Two years later, the PBA told The New York Times that police "should
have sufficient retaliatory means at our disposal" against anyone who
would attack the police. The PBA claimed to be in a guerrilla war with
the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a military splinter group of the Black
Panther Party. But in fact, police tactics more resembled the American
military than a guerrilla force: Police sought to overwhelm their
opponents with superior hardware and sheer force. The NYPD and FBI
dedicated 150 officers to kill suspected BLA member Twymon Meyers on a
New York City street in 1973 and then stationed snipers on rooftops at
his funeral in Harlem.
Shotguns and legal immunity became more common among the NYPD, as in the
rest of the nation. In 1984, an officer used a shotgun to kill
66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs
<http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/13/nyregion/state-judge-dismisses-indictment-of-officer-in-the-bumpurs-killing.html?pagewanted=all>
during an eviction. As is by now expected news, the officer who killed
Bumpers -- like the officers who killed Michael Stewart
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/04/the-heartbreaking-saga-of-michael-stewart-the-inspiration-for-do-the-right-thing-s-radio-raheem.html>,
Anthony Baez
<http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/30/nyregion/clash-over-a-football-ends-with-a-death-in-police-custody.html>,
Amadou Diallo
<http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/26/nyregion/diallo-verdict-overview-4-officers-diallo-shooting-are-acquitted-all-charges.html?pagewanted=all>,
Sean Bell,
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/18/killed-by-the-nypd-black-men_n_5600045.html>Eric
Garner
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/12/daniel_pantaleo_not_indicted_why_the_nypd_officer_wasn_t_indicted_in_the.html>
and so many other New Yorkers -- was either acquitted or never indicted.
As part of its war, the PBA has provided legal, financial or public
support for officers who have shot, choked or otherwise killed people in
the line of duty.
At the same time, the PBA claims that an ongoing "war on cops"
necessitates denying parole to anyone who was convicted of violence
against police officers, regardless of their conduct in prison or risk
to society. A button
<https://www.nycpba.org/miscellaneous/copkillers.html> on the PBA's
website enables visitors to send letters to the New York Parole Board
opposing release of parole-eligible people who were convicted of
attacking police officers. According to the Release Aging People in
Prison
<http://rappcampaign.com/police-block-justice-in-parole-as-on-the-streets/>
campaign, the PBA's hardline stance turns the parole board into a
"re-sentencing body" to give people a life sentence not imposed by a
judge or jury. This goes against the logic of parole, which is supposed
to judge whether someone poses a risk of harm in the present rather than
on the basis of the offense for which a person was originally convicted.
This is the world the "war on cops" has made; one in which police kill
unarmed people regularly yet claim to be under attack themselves. Even
as some high-profile commentators have proclaimed that Black Lives
Matter, they still act as if police lives matter more. Pundits who
lament the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile protest the
"horrific murders" and "cold-blooded killings" of police in Dallas and
Baton Rouge. Were Sterling and Castile's deaths not horrific? Why is
there no attention to the blood temperature of the officers who killed a
37-year-old man for selling CDs on a sidewalk or who pulled over a
32-year-old man for a broken taillight and a "wide-set nose"
<http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2016/07/philando-castile-pulled-over-because-he-matched-description-of-suspect-with-wide-set-nose-shots-fired-less-than-2-minutes-later/>
and ended up shooting him to death in front of his girlfriend and her
four-year-old child?
"I do not believe in the war between races," Lorna dee Cervantes
declared in her classic 1981 poem
<http://aspotlightoflornadeecervantes.blogspot.com/p/poem-for-young-white-man-who-asked-me.html>.
"But in this country/ there is war." The "war on cops" functions
similarly: its truthfulness may be easily dispelled but its power is
much harder to dislodge. The task, embraced with such clarity in the
recent #FreedomNow protests, is to end the war by police. There is no
war on cops. But in this country, there is war.
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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