Except 4 from The Executed God:
My publisher, Fortress Press, has agreed to allow me to post segments of the forthcoming new edition of my book, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (now just out). These posts will be altered a bit for appearing here at my website, with some deletions and even additions made here. Please know that these advance postings will look a bit differently, and have the benefit of context, when read within the argument of the whole book. Click on above art for full display of book cover. (Image at right from Off the Grid News, credit intellihub.com)
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by Mark Lewis Taylor
Studying over 800 SWAT team actions between 2010 and 2013, the ACLU report, The War Comes Home, details the extraordinary intensification of militarized police.[1] Professor Peter Kraska has offered some of the most detailed confirmations of the militarization of U.S. police forces,[2] evidenced, above all, by the dramatic rise of SWAT team actions, from an average of “only” 3,000 raids per year in the 1980s to over 45,000 in 2009.[3]
As the increase of SWAT actions over the 1980s and 1990s suggests, militarized policing is not new. It is not simply a post-9/11 phenomenon. Demonstrators in Seattle in November 1999 confronted fully-outfitted military police in that city’s streets when then unprecedented actions of protestors closed down World Trade Organization meetings of that year.
“In truth,” writes Jeffrey St. Clair, “the police have always been militarized.”[4] He cites not only the Seattle encounter, but also the 1914 use of machine guns by local police, security forces, and the National Guard that killed striking men, women and children (26, all told) in Ludlow, Colorado, where coal workers had gone on strike. There are the infamous “Palmer Raids,” wherein U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, with the young J. Edgar Hoover, orchestrated extraordinary violence in early domestic “Cold War” years against Russian immigrants, anarchists, and labor union members. Black radicals were routinely targeted; recall, Chicago police and FBI Counter Intelligence Operations that killed Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their beds,[5] or the 1985 attack on the MOVE Organization, a black naturalist and liberation group in West Philadelphia, bombed by Philadelphia authorities using a military explosive causing uncontrolled neighborhood destruction and loss of life, including children.[6]
St.Clair might have included, too, the 1921 bombing of Tulsa’s successful black community, often termed “Black Wall Street.” Armed whites came at this successful early twentieth century community of Black businesses and entrepreneurs from land and sky. Planes used by police and others came from Curtis-Southwest Field (no longer used), which included “six biplane two-seater trainers from use during World War I.”[7]
Throughout U.S. history—whether it was a matter of controlling indigenous peoples across Western lands that white settlers wanted to occupy, black populations deemed unruly, or laborers (white, Mexican, Chinese, Filipino) not complying with the economic usurpation of a white overclass—the weaponry of military and local policing have often comingled.
The Occupy movements across major cities in 2011 and 2012 also prompted a strong alliance between corporate power and the national surveillance state, cooperating to organize military police repression of citizens exercising their freedom of expression in Occupy’s demonstrations. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, described “the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve member with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Secuirty. She termed it ‘police-statism’.”[8]
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[1] American Civil Liberties Union, The War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, June 23, 2014, accessed June 20, 2015, https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/jus14-warcomeshome-report-web-rel1_1.pdf .
[2] Peter B. Kraska, “Militarization and Policing – Its Relevance to 21st Century Police,” Policing – A Journal of Policy and Practice, 1, no. 4 (2007): 501-13; and Peter B. Kraska, Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001).
[3] Peter B. Kraska, cited in “US Police Departments are Increasingly Militarized, Finds Report,” The Guardian, June 24, 2014, accessed June 20, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/jun/24/military-us-police-swat-teams-raids-aclu .
[4] Jeffrey St. Clair, “The Big Heat: A Short History of Escalating Police Violence,” CounterPunch, Weekend Edition, October 10-12, 2014, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/10/the-bigheat-2/ .
[5] Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010).
[6] See the documentary film Let the Fire Burn (Silver Spring, MD: Amigo Media, 2013). It remains the best introduction to this event. Also see John Anderson and Hilary Hevenor, Burning Down the House: MOVE and the Tragedy of Philadelphia (New York: Norton, 1987); and Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia versus MOVE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
[7] Tim Madigan The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 4, 131–32, 144, 159, 164, 249.
[8] Naomi Wolf, “Revealed: How the FBI Coordinated the Crackdown on Occupy,” The Guardian, December 29, 2012, accessed June 20, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy .