Robert C. Koehler
We wrecked
This ain't working, guys -- I mean, firing rubber bullets into anguished crowds, siccing attack dogs on moms and children. I mean, inventing enemies, going to war, unleashing state-of-the-art firepower in all directions and eventually losing, but not before we've inflicted maximum suffering on the innocent and magnified the original problem tenfold.
We lose every war we fight.
Another way to say that is: We exacerbate every problem we militarize. Indeed, militarization is as much a part of the problem -- as much a threat to civilization -- as, for instance, terrorism or drugs. And the recent, ongoing community uproar in
"They just released the dog and I had my baby," a woman tells the TV news reporter, bursting into tears. "The dog scratched me with his teeth."
This was on
The whole thing is
The next day, the police fatally shot
What the
But the militarization of crime prevention has been a growing phenomenon in local police departments since the 1980s, when the Reagan administration began its war on drugs and seduced skeptical police departments across the country to clamber aboard with the lure of free military hardware.
"The transformation from 'community policing' to 'military policing' began in 1981,"
Two decades later, in the wake of 9/11, the militarization of America's police intensified, when the Bush administration pulled local departments into the war on terror. "Now, police officers routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms,"
The most serious consequence of police militarization isn't "weapon inflation," they noted, but "the subtle evolution in the mentality of the 'men in blue' from 'peace officer' to soldier."
A police officer's mission is to keep the peace. "Soldiers, by contrast," they wrote, "are trained to identify people they encounter as belonging to one of two groups -- the enemy and the non-enemy -- and they often reach this decision while surrounded by a population that considers the soldier an occupying force. Once this identification is made, a soldier's mission is stark and simple: Kill the enemy. . . . Indeed, the Soldier's Creed declares, 'I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of
As tensions wind tighter and tighter in our troubled nation, the last thing we need is domestic war departments occupying poor and working-class neighborhoods, violently aggravating those tensions and, while they're at it, stoking historic racism. The last thing we need is militarized quick fixes, which cause our troubles to metastasize.
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