War on our Soil: The Hyper-Militarization of Law Enforcement Agencies in the United States Author, Mari Faines
Abstract Three years removed from the murder of George Floyd, the world remembers the Summer of 2020 filled with protestors in the streets, calling for equity and justice. The world was forced to grapple with the images of tanks, guns, and tear gas as militarized police forces crowded United States urban areas. The US sent a clear message to Black people and those of whom supported the cause, we will meet your calls for justice with violence and hyper-militarization. American wars have always been unjust, inequitable, and disproportionately destructive for Black communities at home and abroad. That summer was no different. Decades of segregation, criminalization, and systemic disenfranchisement has led to what the Kerner report forcased as “two separate and unequal societies' ”. (Embrick 2015) Black citizens in the United States have not been recognized as full citizens or afforded the same safeties under US federal laws. For some Americans police are a symbol of safety and security, while for Black communities, they’re a symbol of surveillance and a wartime occupying force (Mummolo 2018). With white supremacy and nationalism being recognized by the federal government as a domestic threat, we can no longer spend over one trillion on endless wars, policing, mass incarceration, immigration, ect. (Lee, HR RES_, 8). The United States hyper-militarization of police in Black communities is destabilizing. It's time to re-think the framework for what safety and security looks like in Black communities. We must create policies that emphasize people and prevention rather than retribution and reaction. Background Historical Framework There are a multitude of ways that sovereign states wield their powers to govern citizens, especially by analyzing the ways in which they regulate their behaviors and revoke their citizens' freedoms. If one looks specifically at the US political system, we must question the tactics and culture that centers violence at the hands of police and other agencies of the state in the name of “safety” and security (Gunderson, Cohen, et al. 2019). This violence wields a particularly rough hand when looking at policing and militarization in communities of color. Since the early 20th century, Black scholars have acknowledged the distinct differences between the ways in which the United States’ police Black and Brown communities versus the rest of America. W.E.B Dubois, in his 1903 work, Souls of Black Folk noted, the color line as a indicator of difference in the ways Black and white citizens were treated by systems in America, noting, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”(Dubois, 1903). In the context of systemic policing, the color line is an explanation for the reasons for the difference in treatment between, white and Black people in the US. James
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