-Caveat Lector- http://www.datafilter.com/mc/c_caqMilitarizationOfThePolice.html WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! The Militarization of the Police By Frank Morales Spring-Summer 1999 # 67 In the early morning of February 5, 1999, Amadou Diallo, 22, was killed in a hail of bullets in the vestibule of his apartment in the Bronx. He was shot by four white officers of the New York City Police Department’s plainclothes Street Crime Unit, who later claimed they were searching for a suspect in the vicinity, and they feared Diallo had a weapon. He did not. Diallo, who had come to New York from Guinea two years before, was struck by 19 of the 41 shots fired at him and died on the way to the hospital. Within two days of the shooting, a thousand people gathered in front of his apartment house, the first of a stream of protest gatherings. After nearly two months of demonstrations, including the arrest of 1,166 people in nearly daily incidents of civil disobedience in front of police headquarters at One Police Plaza, the officers were all indicted by a Bronx Grand Jury on charges including a count of second degree murder, which alleges that the officers intended to kill Mr. Diallo. If convicted, they could face 25 years to life. Other investigations of the shooting have begun, including a federal Justice Department civil rights inquiry involving the Street Crime Unit. In the aftermath of Diallo killing, the Unit has come under vigorous media scrutiny. Reports have documented the Street Crime Unit’s violations of the rights of innocent, mostly non-white, people, particularly by unjustified searches. While the press covered the protests,(1) most media voices, generally friendly to the administration, have supported the Mayor’s "right or wrong" defense of the police, stressing the overall drop in crime along with a purported decrease in police shootings. These reports concede merely an over-reaction, and justify the shooting, despite the 41 shots. The implication is that "aggressive policing" is a price worth paying for a better "quality of life." But is it? A number of reports confirm that across America police killings are up. In 1990, 62 people died at the hands of the police, while in the first nine months of 1998 the number had grown to 205, an annual increase of more than 230 percent.(2) Police Killings on the Rise There is little record-keeping of police homicides, like the nameless graves at Potters Field. According to Amnesty International, "since 1994, the federal government has been legally required to collect national data on police use of excessive force, but Congress has failed to provide the funding necessary for it to do so.... Disturbingly, there are no accurate, national data on the number of people fatally shot or injured by police officers."(3) Those who insist that police killings have decreased over the last twenty years rely upon Deadly Force: What We Know, a 1992 publication of the Police Executive Research Foundation, which is not only biased, but sorely out of date. In fact, Amnesty International reports that after a low of 14 police killings in 1987, "the number of police shootings in NYC started to rise again from the late 1980s onward, a trend seen also in some other major cities. In 1990, 41 civilians were shot dead by NYC police officers, the highest number since the mid-1970s." There has been no letup since then. Amnesty also noted that "a disproportionate number of people shot in apparently non-threatening or questionable circumstances in New York City are racial minorities."(4) Concurrently, since 1980, there has been a 500 percent growth in the activities of police paramilitary SWAT-type units across the country.(5) The Commandos of the NYPD What some laud as aggressive police work, and others call police brutality, has become a major political issue, not only in New York City, where it is threatening to undo Mayor Giuliani’s bid for higher office. What both critics and defenders of the police fail to probe is the background of the Street Crime Unit. Is it a peculiarly New York City phenomenon, or is it typical of urban policing nationwide? The Street Crime Unit has operational, political, and ideological roots that need to be understood if all the pious talk about better police-community relations is to have any meaning. The concepts of "aggressive policing" and "quality of life," and the relationship between them, must be subjected to a more probing analysis than it has received. Members of the NYPD’s Street Crime Unit are known as "the commandos of the NYPD."(6) In existence since 1971, the unit has undergone a 300 percent build-up since 1997. Former NYC Police Commissioner William Bratton encouraged the men to "become far more aggressive."(7) Currently made up of roughly 400 mostly white officers, this unit, along with the 7,000 strong Narcotics Unit, represent the front line in Mayor Giuliani’s "quality of life" crackdown on–and criminalization of–people of color, especially young, poor, and homeless people. They wear (and peddle) tee shirts that say: "Certainly There Is No Hunting Like the Hunting of Men." And their slogan is, "We own the night." According to police data, the unit’s activity "has in the last two years resulted in 45,000 street searches to net fewer than 10,000 arrests."(8) Nearly all of those stopped by police were people of color. But New York State Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer, who has launched a civil rights investigation into the "stop and frisk" practices of the Street Crime Unit, "said the unit may have searched hundreds of thousands of people in the last two years without finding any basis for arresting them."(9) In fact, the New York Times reported, "half the gun arrests made by the Street Crime Unit in the last two years were thrown out of court."(10) Federal Aid Meanwhile, federal government efforts are now aiming to provide the unit with the latest in "hunting" technology. The Clinton administration extended the police/military connection by mandating that the Department of Defense and its associated private industries form a partnership with the Department of Justice to "engage the crime war with the same resolve they fought the Cold War." The program, entitled, "Technology Transfer From Defense: Concealed Weapons Detection,"(11) calls for the transfer of military technology to domestic police organizations to better fight "crime." Previously, direct "transfers" of this sort were made only to friendly foreign governments.(12) This latest directive from the Clinton administration ensures the formalization of direct militarization of the police. Speaking to members of the defense, intelligence, and industrial communities in November 1993, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno contrasted the victory over the Soviet Union to the "war against crime." "So let me welcome you," she informed her guests, "to the kind of war our police fight every day. And let me challenge you to turn your skills that served us so well in the Cold War to helping us with the war we’re now fighting daily in the streets of our towns and cities across the nation."(13) Shortly after this challenge was issued, the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense entered a five-year partnership to formalize joint technology sharing and development efforts for law enforcement and those military operations unrelated to war.(14) Stated areas of "shared" law enforcement technology include "devices to detect concealed weapons," including unobtrusive scanners,(15) to avoid "Fourth Amendment limitations" against unreasonable searches. Another shared technology is in the area of "virtual reality training, simulation, and mission planning.(16) A History of Brutality Historical instances of collaboration between the police and the military reveal not only the operational aspects of such "transfers," but political and ideological ones as well. The current NYPD Street Crime Unit, along with the former Civic Affairs Unit in Philadelphia, active in the targeting of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal for his spirited and informed defense of MOVE (see sidebar), grew out of the anti-radical "red squads" of the sixties. These police units, laden with the most dedicated and brutal white supremacists, adapted, over time and changing circumstances, their hatred of radicals to a hatred of "druggies and criminal perpetrators." This change coincided with the broader criminalization of protest, the boom in drug busts, and the ideological and practical dehumanization of certain people, especially Blacks (as in the promotion of books like The Bell Curve, the move to "workfare" neo-slavery, the depiction of Black and Latino youth as born into a violent "underclass," etc.). Thus, by the 1980s, "the police were confronted with charges of brutality in the treatment of Blacks, but not in a context of racial or political protest."(17) Organizations like the Street Crime and Narcotics Units are the spearhead of politicized police departments and carry on the strategies of yesterday’s "red squad" war on radicals. In addition, these police units have become, and remain, the chief beneficiaries of generous military largesse. Throughout the seventies, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration facilitated these military "transfers" through the creation of entities like Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units which were modeled on the U.S. military’s Special Forces. In the 1970s, the NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) functioned in this role. It "bore a distinction akin to that of the Green Berets."(18) Seeing themselves in a "war for survival," BOSS targeted the Black and Latino liberation movements in NYC as "part of a trade-off to appease elements in the police that threatened self-help and vigilantism unless punitive courtroom measures were taken against the ghetto militants"(19) Hardline police factions like the Law Enforcement Group orchestrated a 1968 mob attack on a Brooklyn courtroom demanding the removal of the judge hearing a case involving three members of the Black Panther Party. When Mayor Giuliani told a rally of police officers on the steps of City Hall some years ago during the Dinkins administration, "I love the New York City Police Department," Black and Latino politicians were roughed up. In December 1997, two former NYPD undercover detectives told the story of one of the most secretive units within the Police Department. The unit, which functioned as a "Black Desk" beginning in the mid-1980s, "aimed at investigating dissident Black groups and their leaders." The unit worked out of the Protective Research Unit, which was in the Public Security Section of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, headed at the time by Deputy Chief Robert Burke. Black groups that were targeted included the Patrice Lumumba Coalition and the December 12th Coalition, then known as the New York 8. "Historically, the department’s political surveillance unit has held some of the NYPD’s most closely guarded secrets. It was nicknamed the Red Squad, because it had investigated supposed Communists and political activists in the McCarthy era. In the 1960s, the unit, known as the Bureau of Special Investigations, turned its attention to Malcolm X and later to the Black Panthers...." These units were, and continue to be, outfitted with the latest in surveillance ("stealth") and weapons technology.(20) The recent upsurge in popular resistance to incidents like the Diallo shooting has spawned much debate on the problem of a runaway militarized police. Soon after the shooting, NYC Police Commissioner Howard Safir ordered the commander of the Street Crime Unit to have daily discussions with his officers about the use of firearms. Patrick E. Kelleher, first deputy commissioner, said at a news conference that "what we are doing is taking a close look at our training procedures and ways police officers communicate among each other in enforcement situations."(21) Mayor Giuliani, for his part, "set aside $15 million for sensitivity training for officers.(22) The Mayor and his Police Commissioner popped into Harlem’s 32nd Precinct one recent morning touting their wallet-sized politeness cue cards. "The police officers listened politely, in a way that members of paramilitary organizations are obliged to listen."(23) One often hears of the need to "sensitize" the police, presumably by making them feel at home in the ghetto. Discussion of issues regarding police training usually assume some form of humanistic behavior modification. The assumption is that the few bad apples need only to read a manual or two and talk to a counselor. In fact, the police have been trained to kill. The only role psychiatric behavior modification is playing is to assist in the brainwashing required to create a killer through conditioning, cultivating in the officer a near instinctual reaction to a programmed stimulus, and a "manufactured contempt" for the "perp." Ron Hampton, a retired police officer and executive director of the National Black Police Association, told Amnesty International in 1988 that "in a training video, every criminal portrayed is Black."(24) *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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