Untwisting Reality

The Rise of the Military Police

• By Poetry X
• 19 September, 2014
• No Comments

What we send around, it comes around – now war is coming home. The United States has become the most effective provider of lethal assassins, arming them with the most advanced killing machinery.  This time the soldiers we like to deploy to those countries we don’t like, now they are in our own backyard. Obviously that doesn’t sound right and for that reason we just use the police to do that dirty job. Our army doesn’t get to use all the weapons so we take some for local use. A law passed 1994 allows the Pentagon to donate surplus military equipment from the Cold War to local police departments. It is widely known, federal law in the US has become very punitive, and the most innocent acts could be targeted by law enforcement, and proving we didn’t have the intention of violating any law is not a protection any longer [Fox News Jul 21, 2009].

The military police is a reality and they are ready to take the streets. In fact, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, with no shame, bragged about the NYPD (New York Police Department) being the 7th biggest army of the world. The NYPD has at least 35’000 uniformed police officers with a $3B joint operations center which includes military personnel. The NYPD functions pretty much like an extension of Homeland Security Department but without the constraints of the Constitution. The NYPD has a $150M surveillance system with a network of over 2000 cameras. Regarding the arsenal available, the NYPD has the capability to take down an aircraft if needed [The Tea Party Economist Mar 15, 2012]. Take into account that a person is arrested on marijuana-related charges in the US every 48 seconds, and most of the times just for possession charges. There were more arrests for marijuana possession than for crimes like murder and non-negligent manslaughter, “forcible” rape, robbery and aggravated assault – 658,231 compared with 521,196 arrests. Putting aside the obvious racism behind Stop and Frisk, a clear violation of the 4th Amendment  by itself, in 2011 alone, 684,330 people were stopped and frisked, and 88% were totally innocent. Leaked FBI records revealed that during the Occupy protests on 2011,  snipers would be deployed to kill “leaders”  of nonviolent Occupy Wall Street movement – at least it was the case for the “Houston chapter” of the OWS [WashingtonsBlog Aug 19-2014 / 2]. There is wide evidense of extreme police repression on the U.S. at the point of taking entire town to martial court like  in Watertown following the Boston marathon bombing on 2013 and on Ferguson, Missouri after the unjustified killing of African American teenager Michael Brown on 2014 [AntiMedia]. The jokes on the repression were not short when comparing Watertown and Ferguson to Iraq not being able to determine the pictures where they were shot.

Some may say in these so dangerous times we need a well prepared police force, but note the police are trained to protect people but soldiers are trained to kill and it seems law enforcement officers rather have a war zone mentality – it is just part of life to see police hitting, kicking, spraying, tasing, beating, brutalizing and shooting people for no apparent reason [TYT Sep 24-2014]. If that is not enough, Consider what it seems to be an isolated cases of rape for simple traffic violations, and not surprisingly the police authorities far away of trying to correct the problem, they justified it saying that if law is followed no officer would rape any woman [Raw Story Sep 23 2014 ]. That would be just an isolated case regarding rape, but it is the standard regarding the hight commands justifying whatever violations the officers incur. Radley Balko, author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop” makes a great analysis of law enforcement conduct more related to a battle field than to mission of serving the community. That is very a very important point since our political and media environment is in a mood of permanent war that probably put people in a bigger propensity  to react violently against people who we thin are not like us. Consider that in 2010 there were 4’861 reports of police misconduct, most of those claims alleged police brutality and about one-quarter involved the use of firearms or stun guns. In fact, people in the U.S. are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. It’s estimated that between 500 and 1’000 people are killed in the US by the police each year. Since 9/11, about 5,000 people in the U.S. have been killed by the police which is almost the same amount of US soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. The main victims of police are Black people, and it estimated that one Black person is killed in the U.S. by the police  every 28 hours [Mint Press News Nov 6, 2013].

Consider that in the last years we see an excessive use of SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) teams. In fact, back in the 1980’s SWAT teams were used in an average of 3,000 deployments per year, but  in 2006 we had 40,000 deployments.  The vast majority of deployment were on events that would be considered violent [The Sentinel May 26, 2010]. A case on point of the military mentality in the police would be Chicago Lt. Jon Burge who was found to have tortured more than 200 arrested suspects between 1972 and 1991. Burge was a US army veteran who served in the Korean war and in Vietnam. Some would say that is just an isolated case.

CIA Black Sites for Disappearing’ U.S. Citizens