{"id":3487,"date":"2014-11-13T13:56:19","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T19:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=3487"},"modified":"2014-11-13T13:56:19","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T19:56:19","slug":"race-and-injustice-in-policing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/race-and-injustice-in-policing\/","title":{"rendered":"Race and (In)Justice in Policing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Tila Neguse, Friends Committee on National Legislation<\/p>\n<div dir=\"ltr\"><span style=\"font-size: large;\">Do you think the police department\u2019s access to military equipment through the government\u2019s 1033 program influenced their response to the protests?<\/span>Military equipment didn\u2019t kill Michael Brown. A police officer with a standard-issue weapon killed this boy. If you look historically at the way the police have responded to protests\u2014for instance during the Civil Rights era\u2014the 1033 program didn\u2019t exist, they didn\u2019t have access to all this military equipment\u2014and the response was still violent.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s important not just to focus on the equipment. This is about a child who lost his life because the police think it\u2019s okay to shoot black men. The militarization of police is just a continuation of over-policing in black neighborhoods, but if they didn\u2019t have the tanks or tear gas, I\u2019m afraid their response may have been the same.<\/p>\n<p>It doesn\u2019t surprise me that the ACLU found that equipment from this program disproportionately affects communities of color. [Michigan] Senator Levin said that the program was intended \u201cto keep police officers safe from heavily armed drug gangs and terrorists.\u201d [emphasis added] The program is tied to the \u201cwar on drugs,\u201d and to me that makes the whole idea problematic.<\/p>\n<p>The war on drugs and on crime in general has contributed to a depiction of black people, of black men, as dangerous and violent and criminal, which in turn, affects the way the police interact with these communities. People in general\u2014and the police specifically\u2014are afraid, and they respond with violence. There\u2019s this conflation of \u201ccrime\u201d with \u201cblack people\u201d and it leads to all these problems like we saw in Ferguson. The media coverage of Ferguson has been very upsetting to me. It\u2019s all about the riots, the looting\u2014 again contributing to that image of the black violent criminal and deflecting from the real issues.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/fcnl.org\/resources\/newsletter\/sept14\/35302_FCNL.pdf\">To read the entire piece, please see the Friends Committee on National Legislation newsletter<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Tila Neguse, Friends Committee on National Legislation Do you think the police department\u2019s access to military equipment through the government\u2019s 1033 program influenced their response to the protests?Military equipment didn\u2019t kill Michael Brown. A police officer with a standard-issue weapon killed this boy. If you look historically at the way the police have responded [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3488,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/unnamed.jpg?fit=75%2C75&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3489,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487\/revisions\/3489"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}