The 30-year-old gift America can’t return
The American police state has become America’s new crime boss.
Thirty years after then-President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law, its legacy of mass incarceration, police militarization and over-criminalization continues to haunt us.
It has become the gift that America can’t seem to return.
We are now suffering the blowback from the triple threats of the Crime Bill: police militarization, a warrior mindset that has police viewing the rest of the citizenry as enemy combatants, and law enforcement training that teaches cops to shoot first and ask questions later.
Too often, that “triple threat” also manifests itself in deadly traffic stops, the use of excessive force against unarmed individuals and welfare checks turned fatal.
The Crime Bill fueled the rise of the police state by pouring funding into law enforcement agencies, particularly for military-grade weaponry and the expansion of police forces. It also laid the groundwork for mass incarceration by incentivizing the construction of more prisons and enacting harsh “three strikes” laws that mandated lengthy sentences for repeat offenders.
Most critically, the Crime Bill led to the explosive growth of SWAT teams across the country.
It’s estimated that more than 80,000 SWAT raids are carried out every year. That translates to over 200 every single day in the U.S.
Among the tens of thousands of raids that leave in their wake the wreckage of lives, homes and trust in the nation’s so-called peacekeepers, some are so egregious as to cut through the apathy and desensitization that has settled over the nation regarding police violence.
Such tragedies are not isolated incidents.
They are the direct result of a system built on policies like the 1994 Crime Bill.
The unfortunate reality we must come to terms with is that America is overrun with militarized cops – vigilantes with a badge – who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
It doesn’t matter where you live – big city or small town – it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.
These warrior cops, who have been trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the public and believe the lives (and rights) of police should be valued more than citizens, are increasingly outnumbering the good cops, who take seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution and maintain the peace.
In this way, the old police motto to “protect and serve” has become “comply or die.”
This is the unfortunate, misguided, perverse message that has been beaten, shot, tasered and slammed into our collective consciousness over the past few decades, and it has taken root.
This is how we have gone from a nation of laws – where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least) – to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.
As a result, Americans of every age and skin color are continuing to die at the hands of a government that sees itself as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence.
The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a war zone.”
Worse, militarized police increasingly pose a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent or require more finesse than the typical freeze-or-I’ll-shoot tactics employed by America’s police forces.
Indeed, disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. (People of color are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.)
If you’re black and disabled, you’re even more vulnerable.
This is America’s new normal.
Like the Ghost of Christmas Past, the 1994 Crime Bill haunts us with its legacy of injustice. Its Ghost of Christmas Present shows us the ongoing struggles with police brutality and mass incarceration. And its Ghost of Christmas Future warns us of a society where over-policing and surveillance become the norm.
So how do we counter the triple threats posed by the Crime Bill?
Despite the outcry from those on the left, the answer is not to de-fund the police, although it wouldn’t hurt to loosen the military industrial complex’s chokehold on America.
What we really need to do is de-fang the police: de-militarize (reduce the reliance on military-grade equipment and tactics), de-weaponize, and focus on de-escalation tactics (prioritizing communication and conflict resolution skills over the use of force), a shift in mindset (moving away from the “warrior” mentality towards a guardian or community policing model), and better accountability.
As with all things, change must start locally, in your hometown.
Remember, a police state does not come about overnight. It starts small, perhaps with a revenue-generating red light camera at an intersection. When that is implemented without opposition, perhaps next will be surveillance cameras on public streets. License plate readers on police cruisers. More police officers on the beat. Free military equipment from the federal government. Free speech zones and zero tolerance policies and curfews. SWAT team raids. Drones flying overhead.
No matter how it starts, however, as I make clear in my book “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” and in its fictional counterpart, “The Erik Blair Diaries,” it always ends the same.