{"id":3721,"date":"2015-03-06T15:32:15","date_gmt":"2015-03-06T21:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=3721"},"modified":"2015-03-06T15:32:15","modified_gmt":"2015-03-06T21:32:15","slug":"the-problem-with-calling-for-demilitarization-of-the-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/the-problem-with-calling-for-demilitarization-of-the-police\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem with Calling for Demilitarization “of the Police”"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Mahroh Jahangiri, Feministing
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not to say there aren\u2019t vast differences and nuances that need to always be named, but our oppressors are literally collaborating together, learning from one another \u2013 and as oppressed people we have to do the same.\u201d \u2013 Cherrell Brown<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The outrage on my Facebook feed has grown dramatically over\u00a0the last six months against the militarization of American cities. I\u2019m glad Ferguson has prompted\u00a0fresh scrutiny<\/a>\u00a0of federal programs that allow local police departments to acquire military weapons.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad we are having some important conversations: we are talking about there being a certain color of the skin of the people gunned down in the name of security in America. We\u2019re talking about\u00a0the irrelevance of ayoung boy\u2019s college ambitions<\/a>\u00a0when it comes to whether he \u201cdeserved\u201d to be\u00a0gunned down. Why\u00a0narratives around state-sanctioned violence<\/a>\u00a0tend to erase<\/a>\u00a0women victims<\/a>. The\u00a0shortcomings<\/a>\u00a0of the term \u2018people of color.\u2019 The misplaced (racist) focus on looting when we should really be talking about decades of oppression that has\u00a0stripped communities of dignified channels of responding to injustice. How the War on Drugs has turned our communities into militarized war zones.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m glad white men and\u00a0institutions<\/a>\u00a0are finally in these\u00a0videos<\/a>\u00a0and posts talking about the role of race in\u00a0anti-civilian violence. Because \u2014 who are we kidding \u2014 white men and institutions dictate sociopolitical agendas so\u00a0when they say race is involved, then we, America, can believe race is involved and not only just in Michael Brown\u2019s death but in the way he \u2014 and most other black humans in this country \u2014 live(d).<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m worried about some of the rhetoric emerging in our outrage over\u00a0militarization.\u00a0\u201cThis isn\u2019t Iraq\u2014it\u2019s Ferguson,\u201d commentators note. \u201cPolice officers aren\u2019t supposed to be soldiers.\u201d Their comparison isn\u2019t unique. I\u2019ve seen it used\u00a0many<\/a>,\u00a0many<\/a>\u00a0times<\/a>. Images show officers using army-grade equipment against unarmed and almost exclusively black civilians. This distinction between police and military has startled people into (finally) thinking critically about police brutality and racism in this country \u2014 about the billions in weaponry created not to protect but to kill being funneled into our own cities and (ab)used by those in power to murder civilians extrajudicially.<\/p>\n

This line of thinking is powerful because it means we are both seeing what it looks like to be black in America \u2014 and what it looks like to live under a constant threat of anti-civilian violence. We are feeling horror, and we are going,\u00a0Whoa, Ferguson looks like the West Bank\/Tahrir\/Baghdad<\/em>, and we are recognizing that our police officers shouldn\u2019t be using weapons made for soldiers and America shouldn\u2019t be looking like Iraq or Palestine.<\/p>\n

But what does this comparison really say? What is being asked, Elif Batuman\u00a0points out<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>, when we are invited to\u00a0consider<\/a>\u00a0whether an image of men in camo on tanks is more appropriate to a \u2018war zone\u2019 or Missouri?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Because brutal anti-civilian violence does not stop within US borders. Because those men on tanks were a problem before they came to US cities. (And police brutality was a problem in those cities\u00a0before<\/a>\u00a0those weapons came in). Because Palestine should not look like today\u2019s Palestine nor Iraq like today\u2019s Iraq. And the reason they do is not because they were born that way but because the military complex that does everything possible to destroy black communities here also kills people with impunity in Iraq and Palestine and everywhere else.<\/p>\n

Militarization isn\u2019t a threat when it happens to the police. It is a threat in and of itself.<\/p>\n

The way we have been saying \u201cpolice are not soldiers\u201d fails to recognize this\u00a0and expressing outrage over the militarization \u201cof the police\u201d fails to recognize this and risks implying that there is some just form of militarization. And that I think is nothing less than violent and nothing less than a destructive form of respectability politics.\u00a0A form that reflects perverse essentialism \u2014 an assumption that, as Batuman notes, \u201canti-civilian violence is\u00a0\u2018un-American\u2019 but not \u2018un-Iraqi<\/a>\u2018\u201d\u00a0\u2014 and\u00a0an even deeper amnesia about the American gift that keeps on giving: occupation. After all, we have played a\u00a0key role in turning other nations into \u2018war zones.\u2019<\/p>\n

Saying Michael Brown should not have been gunned down because he was going to college means there was an okay place for him to have been gunned down.<\/p>\n

Saying Ferguson\u2019s police should not gun down non-white people with military weapons because they are not soldiers means that but there is an okay place for soldiers to gun down non-white people with military weapons.<\/p>\n

Saying America looks like Kabul means America should know better than to act like Kabul.<\/p>\n

But Brown should not have been gunned down because he was human,\u00a0and Ferguson should not gun down people with military weapons because those non-white people are also human,\u00a0and Ferguson looks like Kabul because they were brutalized by the same military complex,\u00a0and our cities\u00a0should not look like war zones not because we as Americans deserve better, but because no one deserves anything less.<\/p>\n

I do think this line of thinking \u2014 of America looking like a war zone \u2014 can be\u00a0really<\/a>\u00a0powerful<\/a>\u00a0when used tobuild<\/a>\u00a0solidarity<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0recognition<\/a>\u00a0within non-white communities witnessing different episodes of militarization. For it really is an interrelated system. But our demands can\u2019t stop at severing the links between police and military; we need to be dismantling the military complex itself.<\/p>\n

And to be clear, I do not think this means everyone needs to talk about everything right now, because it is so okay to focus on battles that are dear to us. There are enough people who won\u2019t let folks feel what they need to feel or let them say what they need to say or bring up their own issues and arrogantly ask people to talk about them instead. That isn\u2019t transnational solidarity, and I don\u2019t want anyone to question where I stand on such bigoted attempts to silence or sidetrack current conversations about domestic policing\u00a0and anti-black racism in the US.<\/p>\n

What\u00a0I do think is that it might be worthwhile for people to question the language we use to fight these systems domestically\u00a0in order to make sure that it does not implicitly condone the same system\u2019s violence abroad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Mahroh Jahangiri, Feministing click here for original article \u201cThis is not to say there aren\u2019t vast differences and nuances that need to always be named, but our oppressors are literally collaborating together, learning from one another \u2013 and as oppressed people we have to do the same.\u201d \u2013 Cherrell Brown The outrage on my Facebook […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3721","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=3721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3723,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3721\/revisions\/3723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}