■■ topic paper – police practices

General – impx for decrease/demilitarize affs

Download 1 Mb.

Page	24/38
Date	20.10.2016
Size	1 Mb.
	#6315

1 ... 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 ... 38

Impacts: militarized policing amplifies disproportionate targeting, needless violence, and civil liberties. Federal programs that fuel militarized SWAT teams are the key cause
Critical impact: police militarization can become a way of framing/targeting certain groups within the U.S.
Police militarization erodes civil liberties/human rights and is used to target activism
Police militarization undermines transparency and creates a culture of post-hoc rationalizations of violence
Status quo criminal justice reforms inadequare – must address militarized policing
Support for militarized policing causes military itself to fill-in
That ruins civil-military relations

_General – impx for decrease/demilitarize affs

Civil rights/repression etc

Post 9/11 police militarization leads to religious discrimination, restrictions on civil liberties, and surveillance of activists

Kane 2015, VICE: How the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Apparatus Is Being Turned on Protesters; 19 January 2015, Alex Kane is a New York–based freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, AlterNet, Salon, the Los Angeles Review of Books and more. http://www.vice.com/read/how-the-nypds-counter-terror-apparatus-is-being-turned-on-police-protesters-119

Activists organizing protests against police brutality in New York are marking Martin Luther King Day with a march beginning in Harlem. Some attendees might be surprised along the way to encounter officers in blue jackets with the words "NYPD Counter Terrorism" emblazoned on the back. But Linda Sarsour, a prominent Muslim-American activist and member of the anti-police brutality group Justice League NYC, one of the sponsors of the march, is almost used to it by now. As head of the Arab American Association of New York, Sarsour has been a leader in the fight against police misconduct. Much of her energy has gone into speaking out against the NYPD's expansive spying program that since 9/11 has targeted Muslims and activists. She's part of a broad coalition trying to change policies ranging from surveillance to " broken windows" policing, the philosophy that going after minor offenses will deter serious crime. "When I see counterterrorism folks amongst protesters, it sends me a message that I'm the enemy, and that they are trying to keep other New Yorkers safe from those protesting for their civil rights," said Sarsour. "It vilifies the people who are being peaceful and asking for something they should already have, asking for things like ending of police brutality." The police wearing the counterterrorism jackets at protests are perhaps the most palpable sign of the agency's transformation since 2001. Before 9/11 the NYPD had no counterterrorism bureau and the Intelligence Division focused its resources on gang activity. After the September 11 attacks, however, billions of dollars were poured into the department to counter the threat of terrorism, as a 2011 60 Minutesreport showed. Critics of the NYPD's post-9/11 turn have been arguing that practices devoted to fighting terrorism have violated the Constitution. Now, they say, the NYPD is unleashing its counterterrorism tools on activists against police brutality, conflating legitimate protest with the threat of terrorism. After a grand jury declined to indict former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, the NYPD's Intelligence Division—which plays a leading role in the department's counterterrorism work—was sent to monitor protests in Missouri. A few weeks later, when thousands of New Yorkers flooded the streets, bridges, highways, and landmarks to protest the grand jury decision to not indict Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD cop who placed Staten Island resident Eric Garner in a chokehold that resulted in his death, counterterrorism officers were deployed at the demonstrations. And after themurders of two NYPD officers by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, an 18-year-old Brooklyn resident was arrested and charged with making a "terroristic" threat after allegedly posting a violent anti-cop cartoon on Facebook. (The NYPD did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.) Mathieu Deflem, a University of South Carolina sociology professor who has studied the NYPD's counterterrorism policies, wrote in an email that "from the police viewpoint, certain measures will be needed as they do have to engage in crowd control." But he cautioned that the vast security apparatus set up after 9/11 makes it "likely that counterterrorism measures will be applied to other forms of crime or problematic behavior... This brings about, as a consequence, a criminalization of protest and possibly even a 'terrorization' of other crimes." Still, Nicholas Casale, a former detective who was involved with NYPD counterterrorism operations in the mid 1990s, told VICE that there was nothing inherently nefarious about the presence of counterterrorism police officers at protests. "When you have a protest, that protest has to be policed. You have a limited finite number of officers. So you're going to have to reorganize your deployment of officers," he said. "When there's an extemporaneous demonstration as we saw, let's say with Occupy Wall Street—where they would appear in different locations—the police department has to draw officers to police the crowd, to stop traffic, to separate from the crowd from people who want to get to work." But counterterrorism agents have gone beyond just policing protests by getting directly involved with arrests. On December 13, tens of thousands of people marched through Manhattan to call attention to police violence and demand accountability for the killings of Garner and Brown. After the sanctioned march petered out, a smaller number of protesters headed to the Brooklyn Bridge. At one point, the demonstrators split in two, with one group on an elevated pedestrian walkway and another group on the highway. According to the NYPD, officers saw Eric Linsker, a 29-year-old professor, holding a garbage can. Fearing that he was going to throw it on officers below, they moved to arrest him. But at least six other demonstrators intervened, allegedly assaulting the police and allowing Linsker to escape. In the early hours of December 14, law enforcement—which had identified Linsker by an ID card in the backpack he left behind—raided his home and arrested him. The arresting officers, according to media reports, were members of the New York–area Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), a unit that includes NYPD officers and FBI agents. Under former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, the number of NYPD detectives assigned to the JTTF went from 17 to 125. Martin Stolar, Linsker's defense attorney, says that the involvement of JTTF officers in an arrest of this sort was "extremely unusual." He added that "to have the Joint Terrorism Task Force misappropriated to [a] demonstration arrest [is] something that is shocking... [The NYPD] overreacted to September 11, and they see terrorism under every corner." Linsker is not being charged with anything close to terrorism, though. Instead, he's accused of a litany of crimes like inciting a riot, assaulting a police officer (though evenprosecutors acknowledge it was other demonstrators who hit officers), possession of a weapon (he had hammers in a backpack), and resisting arrest. Stolar has kept a close watch on the NYPD for decades. As Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman—the Pulitzer Prize–winning former Associated Press journalists who exposed the NYPD spying program—recount in their book Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Spying Unit and Bin Laden's Final Plot Against America , Stolar helped discover that the NYPD had effectively set up the New York City chapter of the Black Panthers. In 1971, while representing Black Panther members accused of planning to bomb a series of targets, Stolar and other lawyers learned that undercover NYPD detectives founded the chapter and then spied on those who signed up, according to Apuzzo and Goldman. After a team of lawyers got the Black Panthers acquitted, Stolar and other attorneys sued the NYPD in federal court, charging that their surveillance of activists violated the Constitution. The lawsuit eventually exposed how the NYPD cast a wide net in its surveillance activities. The police had a "black desk" that monitored black people, and an "extremist desk" that spied on anti-war organizers. In 1985, the parties finally settled what came to be known as the Handschu case, named after plaintiff Barbara Handschu, a civil rights lawyer. The court imposed guidelines, now known as the Handschu agreement, on when, exactly, the NYPD can spy on activists. Under these rules, the police initially could only investigate activities protected by the Constitution when a crime was about to be committed. Undercover agents were to be deployed only if necessary. And the police were barred from keeping intelligence files on people unless they engaged in criminal activity. September 11 changed the game. In the aftermath of the attacks, the NYPD went back to court to ask for a change in the Handschu agreement, and was largely successful. Now, the department is free to use undercover officers to investigate without knowledge of a specific crime; there only has to be a possibility that a crime is being committed. Much of the NYPD's subsequent spying activities have targeted Muslims, as police officers have infiltrated mosques and employed informants who use inflammatory language to ferret out terrorists. The NYPD also created a "Demographics Unit" that mapped out Muslim communities in the city and in Newark, New Jersey, a squad that was shut down by Mayor Bill de Blasio to much fanfare earlier this year. But as he tries to appease both bitter cops and protesters enraged at a broken criminal justice system, the mayor is discovering that just having officers with "counter terrorism" on their uniforms around demonstrations is source of tension. "It's conflating dissent with terrorism," said Stolar, "and that's really extraordinarily dangerous and very un-American."

Impacts: militarized policing amplifies disproportionate targeting, needless violence, and civil liberties. Federal programs that fuel militarized SWAT teams are the key cause

ACLU 2014 (American Civil Liberties Union, “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing”, June 2014, https://www.aclu.org/report/war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-police, note://// indicates par. breaks)[AR SPRING16]

Across the country, heavily armed Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams are forcing their way into people’s homes in the middle of the night, often deploying explosive devices such as flashbang grenades to temporarily blind and deafen residents, simply to serve a search warrant on the suspicion that someone may be in possession of a small amount of drugs. Neighborhoods are not war zones, and our police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. However, the ACLU encountered this type of story over and over when studying the militarization of state and local law enforcement agencies. This investigation gave us data to corroborate a trend we have been noticing nationwide: American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight.1 Using these federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals purportedly to wage the failed War on Drugs, the battlegrounds of which have disproportionately been in communities of color. But these arsenals are by no means free of cost for communities. Instead, the use of hyperaggressive tools and tactics results in tragedy for civilians and police officers, escalates the risk of needless violence, destroys property, and undermines individual liberties. This report provides a snapshot of the realities of paramilitary policing, building on a body of existing work demonstrating that police militarization is a pervasive problem. Analyzing both existing secondary source materials and primary source data uncovered through the ACLU’s public records investigation, this report examines the use of SWAT teams by state and local law enforcement agencies and other aspects of militaristic policing.2 As explained in the Methodology section, our statistical analysis included more than 800 SWAT deployments conducted by 20 law enforcement agencies during the years 2011-2012.3

Critical impact: police militarization can become a way of framing/targeting certain groups within the U.S.

KRASKA professor and senior research fellow, college of justice and strategy @ Eastern Kentucky University 2009 (Peter, “Militarization and Policing – It’s Relevance to 21^st Century Police”, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, Vol 1, Issue 4, p.4-5,note://// indicates par. breaks)[AR SPRING16]

It is worth noting that beyond the police, militarism and militarization can operate as powerful theoretical lenses to make sense of many issues and trends in society— particularly those societies such as the United States that place a premium on military superiority. In fact, many analysts see these as dominant influences in foreign policy and increasingly domestic policies when it comes to issues of security.//// For example, the US government has been rapidly redefining what constitutes a threat to national security by turning its gaze inward, thereby militarizing to a significant degree its domestic security efforts (referred to as the ‘national security syndrome’) (Sherry, 1985; Klare, 1980). Scholars such as Tonry (2004); Christie (2000) and Ericson and Carriere (1994) have illuminated the role that martial rhetoric has major role in this process— focusing specifically on the militarization of US domestic crime-control initiatives (and increasingly in other countries as well). Metaphors such as the war on drugs, crime, and terrorism play a powerful role in the construction of reality: they shape discursive practices, clarify values and understanding, and guide problem-solving processes. Framing the crime, terrorism, and drug problems using militaristic language, thus, will likely result in thoughts and actions which correspond with the war/military paradigm (Kraska, 2001). Another useful insight came from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (retired US Army general and former US President) thinking about the growing influence of the military paradigm. He dedicated his farewell speech to warning against the growing influence of militarism in US society. He coined the phrase, ‘militaryindustrial- complex’ (M.I.C.) in an attempt to raise the public consciousness about the undue influence of militarization in US society. Contemporary militarization in his view benefited not the public good, but politicians bureaucrats, and corporations; a charge often heard today from those critical of the US-led war against Iraq. Similarly, several academics have argued that the crime-control enterprise operates as an analogous industrial complex— complete with political, governmental, and private-growth pressures (Christie, 2000; others found inKraska, 2004).This essay raises the distinct possibility that we are witnesses to a growing overlap between military and criminal justice complexes.

Police militarization erodes civil liberties/human rights and is used to target activism

HILL and BERGER 2009 (Stephen, associate prof International Relatkions @ University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, specializing in paramilitary policing and conflict resolution, and Randall, professor criminal justice @ Univ. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, “A Paramilitary Policing Juggernaut”, Social Justice, V.36 No. 1, p.31, note://// indicates par. breaks)[AR SPRING16]

According to David H. Bayley (2001: 14), democratic policing is predicated on four principal norms: (1) that police "must give top operational priority to ser? vicing the needs of individual citizens and private groups"; (2) that they "must be accountable to the law rather than the government"; (3) that they should "protect accountable to the law rather than the government"; (3) that they should "protect human rights, especially those that are required for the sort of unfettered political activity that is the hallmark of democracy"; and (4) that they "should be transpar? ent in their activities." By undermining these norms, the paramilitary policing juggernaut subverts democratic policing in the United States.///// Evidence of this predicament is burgeoning. Like the scholars covered above who discussed the state and globalization, Daryl Meeks (2006: 37) argues that U.S. policing is increasingly moving toward a "military operational model" that encourages "street-level officers, as well as law enforcement executives, to adopt the view that the inner-city environment is a war-zone and the enemy is the urban underclass." This militarization is occurring despite official statistics showing that violent crime rates are decreasing. ////Muzzatti (2005:120) has also documented that U.S. policing is inappropriately criminalizing social problems and conflating "the exercise of constitutionally protected rights with crime, insurrection, and terrorism." For example, he notes that in preparing for the potential Y2K disaster, U.S. law enforcement defined the public as the "enemy." Similarly, he believes that through legislation such as the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act, the "War on Terrorism" has become a "catchall category" used by the police to criminalize "a wide range of nonviolent political and social activists committed to progressive social change" (p. 120). There is, perhaps, no better example of this phenomenon than the "Battle in Seattle" of 1999. The corrupting effects militarization can have on Bayley's norms of democratic policing were made amply apparent in a subsequent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report that condemned the Seattle police for transforming a protest over the World Trade Organization into a combat zone. Drawing on some 500 eyewitness accounts, the ACLU report painted a disturbing picture of police taking extreme measures against protesters and non-participants. The following are but a representative sampling from that report:

The Seattle Police Department used massive amounts of teargas against crowds even when such use was not necessary to protect public safety and the safety of officers. ? Rubber bullets were used against people who posed no threat. They were also used against largely nonviolent crowds and against individuals who were engaged in passive resistance or were fleeing. ? Police officers were not making split-second decisions in emergency situations. They simply used their weapons on people who offended them or caught their attention. Officers also used clubs, teargas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets against individual bystanders in downtown Seattle. (In Out of Control: Seattle's Flawed Response to Protests Against the World Trade Organization, June 2000, ACLU of Washington.)

This kind of behavior is most prevalent among police teams trained in the use of military tactics, equipment, and maneuvers. As Balko (2006: 1) has shown, such PPUs increasingly "subject nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleep? ing." And these pernicious effects are becoming more common, given that PPU "call outs" have begun to reach into virtually every aspect of civic life, including breaking up fights on school property, conducting raids on illegal gambling opera? tions, crowd control duties, and saturation patrolling of suspected “crime-prone” minority neighborhoods (Ibid).

Police militarization undermines transparency and creates a culture of post-hoc rationalizations of violence

Finally, the paramilitary policing juggernaut is likely to crush the complimen? tary norms of democratic policing: transparency and accountability. Militarization and the use of PPUs are always accompanied by arguments for greater security and secrecy to protect police operations. For example, the street-skills training of PPUs is usually deemed to be an internal matter not subject to citizen input or external review. Kraska and Cubellis (2004) have warned that further militariza? tion of the police may encourage an explicit "means justifies the ends" mentality in which due process and justice are subverted to "necessity and expediency," and miscarriages of justice hidden under "secrecy." This lack of transparency makes it difficult to detect and investigate police corruption. Nathan Pino and Michael Wiatrowski (2006) have found that paramilitarism in the police leads to increased complaints and lawsuits, lower levels of support among the populace, and can impede creative ideas.

Status quo criminal justice reforms inadequare – must address militarized policing

Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., has announced broad criminal justice reforms, including guidelines to curtail the use of mandatory minimum sentencing laws by federal prosecutors in certain drug cases and a $4.75 million project funded by the federal government and designed to ease mistrust between local police departments and minority communities by collecting and studying data on searches, arrests, and case outcomes in order to help assess the impact of possible bias. These developments have real potential to reduce America’s excessive reliance on overly aggressive approaches to policing and punishing drug crimes, but there is a danger that these federally-funded efforts could be undermined by the federal government’s role in subsidizing the use of paramilitary weapons and tactics in localities, particularly in many communities of color. Without rethinking its role in militarizing local police departments, the federal government may end up sabotaging the very same reforms it is championing.

Hypermasculinity

…critical

KRASKA professor and senior research fellow, college of justice and strategy @ Eastern Kentucky University 1996 (Peter, “Enjoying Militarism: Political/Personal Deilmmas in Studying UoSo Police Paramilitary Units”, Justice Quarterly, Vol 13, No3, September, p.419-422 ,note://// indicates par. breaks)[AR SPRING16]

Enloe (1980:132) provides a useful definition of militarization: "militarization is occurring when any part of a society becomes controlled or dependent on the military or on military values." As illustrated by the highly militarized subculture of the police/soldiers in this research, the militaristic nature of the discourse on crime and drug control— wars on crime and on drugs—constitutes more than ineffectual media/political rhetoric. Filtering solutions to the complex social problems of crime and substance abuse through the "war" metaphor helps to structure our values in use, our theories, and, most important, our actions (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Morgan 1986). A metaphor and associated discourse materialized, for example, into urban police departments deploying paramilitary police groups to patrol U.S. neighborhoods.//// The value and belief system that underpins the process of militarization is militarism. Ironically, criminology as a whole has not employed this concept to any appreciable extent despite the obvious militaristic presuppositions underlying the operations of the CJIC.1 3 Militarism is defined as an "ideology which stresses aggressiveness and the use of force, and the glorification of military power, weaponry and technology, as the means to solve problems" (Kraska 1993:163). In short, militarism is an ideology of both symbolic and real violence. It underlies the tendency of states throughout history, even those preceding industrialization and capitalism, to approach perceived problems, either external or internal, with military violence or the threat thereof.//// Militarism, however, does not remain encapsulated within militaries; militarization requires militarism to be an integral part of society's value and belief systems, to provide moral support, young people, and material resources. This militaristic dimension to culture is particularly acute in societies that place strong emphasis on military superiority, such as the United States. Gibson (1994) has developed an instructive thesis on the consequences of the pervasiveness and continued addictiveness of militarism in recent U.S. popular culture since the "loss" of the war in Vietnam (also see Hamm 1993). In referring to what he terms the "New War Culture," Gibson explains the resurrection of martial culture during the 1980s and 1990s as a reaction to losing the Vietnam War. He continues:

It is hardly surprising, then, that American men—lacking the confidence in government and the economy, troubled by the changing relations between the sexes, uncertain of their identity or their future—began to dream, to fantasize about the powers and features of another kind of man who could retake and reorder the world. And the hero of all these dreams was the paramilitary warrior. (1994:11; emphasis added)

Gibson documents, through film, politics, media, and field research, how the "new culture of paramilitarism," which emphasizes the lone warrior or small elite groups of fellow warriors, pervaded young males' minds during the 1980s. This ideology of paramilitarism helps to explain the contemporaneous increase in police paramilitary units within federal and local law enforcement agencies, as well as the paramilitarism found in right-wing militia and hate groups and in violent urban gangs.1 4 ////As shown by my reaction to the MP5 scenario, another cultural force—hypermasculinity—provides the "seeds" and "fuel" that sustain militarism (Enloe 1993): "In most cultures that we know about, to be manly means to be a potential warrior" (Enloe 1993:52). The interwoven scripts of militarism and masculinity provide the cultural foundation for structural forms of violence by militaries to further state power, and furnish a more diffuse but still pervasive social network of threatened and real violence among individual men. In a sense, then, this research experience was a continuation of thousands of years of prescripted masculine thinking and power building—a history of militarized praxis still vital in the 1990s, and one in which I unreflectively reemerged as a participant.

Hurts cmr

Support for militarized policing causes military itself to fill-in

BEEDE Rutgers-The State Univ. of New Jersey 2008 (Benjamin, librarian emeritus, has published articles in The Historian, Policy Studies Journal, “The Roles of Paramilitarized and Militarized Police”, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Summer, p.60, note://// indicates par. breaks, note: this author uses CP for civil policing and MiP for military policing)[AR SPRING16]

Ultimately, enhancement of police capabilities may not be too high a price to pay both to meet security challenges and to obviate the threats inherent in military involvement in law enforcement, but such enhancement is hardly without problems. Although current security problems may bring increased cooperation between police and military authorities, they may also bring increased conflict between them. If large-scale external threats continue to diminish and if PMP and MiP receive significantly increased levels of governmental support, military forces may begin shedding their aversion to police work in order to maintain their status. In any event, a new security era may be starting in which there will be considerable jockeying between police and armed services.

That ruins civil-military relations

The convergence of police and military roles may change civil-military relations in many countries. On the one hand, thrusting military forces into internal security problems may weaken civil-military relations (Desch 1996: 22¬ 27). On the other hand, the enhancement of police forces may complicate civilmilitary relations by adding another dimension. Given the continuing importance of the German Army during the Weimar era, Blood (2006:35) surely goes too far in suggesting that "[effectively, civil-police relations had superseded civil-military relations," but one can envisage situations in which such a change could occur.

… read a CMR impact

Download 1 Mb.

Share with your friends:

1 ... 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 ... 38