More on Ferguson

Plenty has been written in the last few days already; I wanted to highlight a few interesting pieces you may not have seen.

The Economics of Police Militarism

One moment, we see a young man with a welt from a rubber bullet between his eyes; the next, three officers with big guns are charging at another black man who has his hands up. On Thursday, Jelani Cobb filed a powerful account from the sidewalks and homes of Ferguson. Cobb asks about “the intertwined economic and law-enforcement issues underlying the protests,” including, for instance, the court fees that many people in Ferguson face, which often begin with minor infractions and eventually become “their own, escalating, violations.” “We have people who have warrants because of traffic tickets and are effectively imprisoned in their homes,” Malik Ahmed, the C.E.O. of an organization called Better Family Life, told Cobb. “They can’t go outside because they’ll be arrested. In some cases, people actually have jobs but decide that the threat of arrest makes it not worth trying to commute outside their neighborhood.”

The Fury in Ferguson and Our Forgotten Lessons from History

Despite the crystal-clear conclusions drawn by the Kerner Commission about why the '60s had seen so much urban unrest, and what would happen if we ignored the lessons of the these rebellions, we are right back where we were 50 years ago. As this Commission noted without equivocation: The urban rebellions of the 1960s stemmed from specific triggers such as police brutality and, more generally, because "discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American." Indeed, this group of experts warned, if this nation doesn't "press for a national resolution" to discrimination, it will become "two Societies, One Black, One White -- Separate and Unequal."

These chickens have indeed come home to roost. If we don't fully understand the fury in Ferguson, rather than dismiss it as senseless urban violence, and if we don't move swiftly and concretely to ensure justice for the family of Michael Brown -- making clear whose violence started this -- then we are in for many more long, hot summers. Guaranteed.

Autopsy Shows Michael Brown was Struck At Least 6 Times



White St. Louis Has some Awful Things to Say About Ferguson

"Our opinion," said the talkative one in a group of six women in their sixties sitting outside the Starbucks, "is the media should just stay out of it because they're riling themselves up even more."

"The protesters like seeing themselves on TV," her friend added.

"It's just a small group of people making trouble," said another.

"The kid wasn't really innocent," chimed in a woman at the other end of the table (they all declined to give their names). "He was struggling with the cop, and he's got a rap sheet already, so he's not that innocent." (While the first point is in dispute, the second isn't: The police have said that Michael Brown had no criminal record.)

If anything, the people here were disdainful and, mostly, scared—of the protesters, and, implicitly, of black people.

Afraid

We’re afraid that maybe if we write something about the police that law enforcement might single us out at the local level, or persecute us based on our prior coverage. We’re afraid—us journalists, 90 percent white at the supervisory level—might be tailed simply for driving down the street, or, if there’s an emergency at our homes, dispatchers will make no effort to help us beyond a late, procedural check-in.

We’re afraid that we will be treated like black people by police.

Ferguson: Is the Damage Done?

The photo to the left made the rounds via Twitter yesterday, circulated by @jRehling. The inscription read, "The new head of the Ferguson response is marching WITH the protesters and suddenly military weapons aren't needed."

Oh, if it only were that easy to resolve police-community problems. As later events proved, no "sudden" respite was forthcoming, and there was plenty of further unrest and violence going on. People are still upset. The killer of Michael Brown has not been arrested yet. And people are very cognizant of the spark that started the fire of unrest in the first place.

Bay Area readers will probably recall the protests in Oakland after Johannes Mehserle's trial for killing Oscar Grant ended in a conviction for involuntary manslaughter. Four years ago, blogging about those protests over at CCC, I wrote:

While older literature from the 1960s analyzed riots and community action in itself, newer studies of riots by criminologists and sociologists portray a very complex picture of how such events develop. It is important to see, as Michael Keith argues, race riots within the larger context of race relations, and to acknowledge the fact that a great part of the problem is not the riot itself but the moral panic generated by the riots. I would not go as far as to say that the riots would not happen if not for the projected police response. But seeing thousands of officers, helicopters, and various devices in Oakland yesterday did seem to communicate an expectation that something very foul was about to occur. This sort of overpreparedness communicates to citizens the expectation of violence and crime. In this interesting paper by Clifford Stott and Stephen Reicher, they interview police officers, showing how tense situations can escalate through the communication between police and protesters at the event.

I think that is true here as well, but there is always plenty of temptation in these situations to escalate, fearing that community reaction will not mirror police calm unless there's readiness. I've seen (and, during grad school, participated in) research conducted on sports events that suggests that audience violence in games increases with the presence of police. Expectations are not everything, and unrest is not in the eye of the beholder, but they do shape reality. And once there is unrest and anger in the air, expectations become, as we've tragically seen in Ferguson, incredibly important.

As an aside note relating to the militarization: I've started thinking that our traditional distinctions between international warfare and domestic conflicts is becoming, if not obsolete, at least much more blurry. What with armies increasingly engaged in traditional policing acts, and police units engaged in warfare, it's becoming harder to tell whether the oppressed public/feared enemy is the "other" or part of the collective "us." I expect international law scholars to be writing about this, if they aren't already.

Book Review: Rise of the Warrior Cop

Of all the frightening and heartwrenching reports about the situation in Ferguson, I found this one particularly poignant. It's a series of Twitter quips from army veterans comparing the equipments and tactics used by the police in Ferguson to their experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Here's just one example:

These army veterans are stunned to see military vehicles, weapons, and tactics used in a domestic situation against civilian population. But these horrific incidents are simply exposing something that has been going on for several decades: the increasing militarization of the police force. This was a good enough reason to finally get to read Radley Balko's new book Rise of the Warrior Cop (2013), which provides history and context to this phenomenon.

Balko starts his narrative with ancient Rome, where freedoms (and an early type of policing) was put in place specifically to prevent the army from overtaking the government. He then places much of what we know as Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure in historical context, explaining why in Medieval and Early Modern Britain (and, as a result, in its colonies) many of these protections--namely, provisions against quartering and the castle doctrine--were important to prevent bloodshed. Until the mid-19th century, troops were seldom used in the context of internal domestic conflicts, but the conflict over slavery changed this restraint and led to full-blown war. After the war, troops in Southern states, stationed there to prevent retaliation (and technically an occupying force of sorts) presented yet another challenge to the Third Amendment. Despite the emergence of police forces (as a new phenomenon), occasionally troops were sent to quell civil riots, such as in the context of school desegregation. While, in the 1960s, the National Guard played a role in such situations, there was common public distaste for the use of military forces in a domestic contest. However, as this happened, the police transformed itself through military education, tactics, and technologies, into a quasi-military force. Some of the 4th Amendment litigation in the1960s--mainly in the area of warrantless searches, knock-and-announce, and the like, revolved around the use of quasi-military techniques in policing.

The 1960s were periods of rising violent crime rates and notable violent incidents (such as the Whitman shootings and labor protests) that raised the question whether the police was appropriately equipped to deal with them. These incidents led to the the rise of police innovator Daryl Gates, who created the first paramilitary police units: SWAT teams against the resistance of more traditional policing experts. The initial units trained in secret. They would later receive more legitimation with further developments: the backlash against Johnson's taskforce on crime (The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society), race riots following MLK Jr.'s murder, and, of course, Richard Nixon's presidential victory, which was based on a platform of crimefighting and police empowering.

The Nixon administration targeted primarily drug crime and started using SWAT teams and break-in techniques that did not include knocking and announcing. These paramilitary technologies were used to combat, among others, the Black Panthers, who not only were on the receiving end, but also organized themselves in a quasi-military fashion. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act reformed not only street tactics, but also surveillance methods, making wiretapping easier and more popular. The Nixon administration invested in treatment and reform, too, and saw some decline in crime attributable to those, but deliberately repressed reports on that angle, because that would undermine the efforts to allow for more repressive crime control.

The 1970s saw more professionalization in paramilitary policing. The commander would storm in front of the men, as in military units, and the units would hide out of sight, which was deemed to be more effective in conflict dispersal than presence on the scene. Anti-drug policing techniques found their way to state legislatures following an all-out PR campaign on crime and drugs.

The introduction of the Reagan-era War on Drugs in the 1980s intensified the use of these military techniques. In particular, that decade saw the introduction of armored carriers, as well as the emergence of national databases and interjurisdictional collaboration. But not only did these technologies not eradicate drug trafficking, they led to an increasing culture of alienation of the police force from its community. People were less and less inclined to collaborate with the police, report, and testify about crime. At the same time, police officers became more and more reified in law, so that lawsuits against them were increasingly difficult and any violence against them unjustifiable and worse than against non-police victims. This alienation made the police force in the community even more akin to a foreign occupying force operating among the enemy.

Balko's book is exceedingly well-written, full of fascinating examples, and pays a lot of attention to detail while not losing the bigger narrative. It bounces back and forth between anecdotes, general trends, police innovations, and legislation. There are a few complementary themes that are missing from his narrative: for example, he leaves his narrative of the National Guard aside, not asking the question whether it's the police that's become more army-like or the military that is increasingly busy in policing missions. His narrative also stays domestic, for the most part, while his argument could be fortified by presenting DEA activities in Mexico as one more example of militarization--crossing borders to fight wars that look like the traditional violent international wars of yesteryear (more on that in our forthcoming review of Ioan Grillo's El Narco). Balko also does not focus on countertrends, such as community policing, that have tried to humanize the police and make it an ally of the community. Nonetheless, the book is an excellent primer to those who want to understand more about why the images from Ferguson are so reminiscent of images from Afghanistan and Iraq. This did not start yesterday, nor is it likely to end without thoroughly rethinking the role of policing and the futility of an all-out war on drugs.