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<h1 id="reader-title">A Brief History of the ''War on Cops'':
The False Allegation That Enables Police Violence</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Dan Berger - July 21,
2016<br>
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<p>As part of a global action proclaiming "<a
target="_blank"
href="http://freedomnow.movementforblacklives.org/">Freedom
Now,</a>" 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 <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/ten-arrested-after-activists-block-entrance-to-police-unions-headquarters-8882412">shut
down </a>the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association while
those in D.C. <a target="_blank"
href="http://byp100.org/byp100-dc-and-blm-dc-shutdown-national-fraternal-order-of-police/">closed</a>
the National Fraternal Order of Police office for the
day.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>Numerous <a target="_blank"
href="http://reason.com/blog/2016/07/19/there-is-still-no-war-on-cops">sources</a>
confirm that there is no such war. Last year was one of
the <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.newsweek.com/it-has-never-been-safer-be-cop-372025">safest
on record</a> for police officers, and even with the
targeted killings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, being a
police officer <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-fleetwood/how-dangerous-is-police-w_b_6373798.html">does
not rate</a> as one of the 10 most dangerous jobs in
the country. It is far less dangerous than logging,
fishing, or roofing.</p>
<p>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: <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/rudy-giuliani-black-lives-matter-puts-a-target-on-police-officers-backs/">declaring</a>
Black Lives Matter to be the latest example of that
specious confrontation.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/us/the-rise-of-the-swat-team-in-american-policing.html">assault
on the Los Angeles Black Panther office</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
target="_blank"
href="https://www.amazon.com/Algiers-Motel-Incident-John-Hersey/dp/0801857775">the
Algiers Motel</a>. 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 <a
target="_blank"
href="http://pun.sagepub.com/content/11/4/491.short">Hurricane
Katrina in 2005 led police</a> to scale back on rescue
efforts in favor of greater policing.)</p>
<p>Some city police departments seized upon the deepening
economic crises of the 1970s to develop undercover
paramilitary forces. As historian <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737235">Elizabeth
Hinton describes in her new book, From the War on
Poverty to War on Crime</a>, 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."</p>
<p>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
<a target="_blank"
href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28593-blood-on-their-hands-the-racist-history-of-modern-police-unions">racist
as such declarations</a> 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 <a target="_blank"
href="https://www.thenation.com/article/report-occupied-territory/">wrote</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/13/nyregion/state-judge-dismisses-indictment-of-officer-in-the-bumpurs-killing.html?pagewanted=all">Eleanor
Bumpurs</a> during an eviction. As is by now expected
news, the officer who killed Bumpers -- like the
officers who killed <a target="_blank"
href="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">Michael
Stewart</a>, <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/30/nyregion/clash-over-a-football-ends-with-a-death-in-police-custody.html">Anthony
Baez</a>, <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/26/nyregion/diallo-verdict-overview-4-officers-diallo-shooting-are-acquitted-all-charges.html?pagewanted=all">Amadou
Diallo</a>, <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/18/killed-by-the-nypd-black-men_n_5600045.html">Sean
Bell,</a><a target="_blank"
href="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">Eric
Garner</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank"
href="https://www.nycpba.org/miscellaneous/copkillers.html">button</a>
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. <a target="_blank"
href="http://rappcampaign.com/police-block-justice-in-parole-as-on-the-streets/">According
to the Release Aging People in Prison</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 "<a target="_blank"
href="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/">wide-set
nose"</a> and ended up shooting him to death in front
of his girlfriend and her four-year-old child?</p>
<p>"I do not believe in the war between races," Lorna dee
Cervantes declared in her classic 1981 <a
target="_blank"
href="http://aspotlightoflornadeecervantes.blogspot.com/p/poem-for-young-white-man-who-asked-me.html">poem</a>.
"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.</p>
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522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
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