The Difference Between a Gun and a Tank

No, that's not the beginning of a joke.  There are differences between guns and tanks, and there are similarities.  And they are on a continuum that costs not just millions of taxpayer dollars, but trust between citizens and government, and in far too many cases, lives.

I remember when the nation first heard about S.W.A.T.  Presumable, these dudes were well trained, cool-headed (and good-looking) heroes that assessed the need for force after all other options had been considered, then proceeded to save the lives of innocent people being held hostage by the truly bad bad guys.  I recall a gripping book by Ed McBain and a TV series.  And the glamour of it all continued to evolve over the years.  While violence across the country has diminished, the fear of violence has grown, feeding the desire for bigger and tougher police forces, bigger and better armed S.W.A.T. teams.

And the problem becomes, "If all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail."  Police are all armed with high powered weapons, and come to expect that any encounter with a civilian could be a deadly one.  Not too many years ago, tasers became the new toy on the block, and before that, pepper spray.  Because they are considered the "safe" alternative, what we found was that they were used not just more indiscriminately, but with abandon.  Peaceful demonstrators, the mentally ill, and just about anyone an officer (or other official, or even non-officials) thought to be a threat, came away hurt, and sometimes lethally.  No, it doesn't take a gun, but you might ask George Zimmerman:  it's always easier with a gun.

Here in South Carolina, we celebrated Columbia's acquisition of the military grade armored vehicle -- the tank -- that cost taxpayers $658,000.  Other than showing it off in parades, only the police chief that requisitioned that and other military grade equipment could imagine a practical use.  In fact, Sheriff Leon Lott foresees such equipment being used in shoot-outs with the bad guys.  Just like on TV.

He calls it "The Peacemaker."

Radley Balko in The Rise of the Warrior Cop, writes about how insidious these weapons of war have become since 9/11.  Every home town thinks they need tactical weapons and Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, happily called MRAPS, for that distant possibility of the terrorist invasion.  Down here in the South, some of our more wild-eyed legislators like to think we citizens might could use them when the feds try to take over.

Back in Richland County, Sheriff Lot paints his tank "U.N. Blue" and sets it in parking lots, at fairs and parades, just to let us all know that it is citizen friendly.  Get us used to seeing it around.  Let the kids climb up in it like they do on the firetrucks.  But in fact, more and more, those big weapons are being used on citizens for suspected crimes like possession of marijuana and illegal poker games.  Homes smashed into, pets shot, neighborhoods traumatized, because those hammers just need to find some nails.  Or, as Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing says:

Don't even think about running an illegal bingo game in Richland County, South Carolina. 

After the August, 2014, Ferguson shooting and the military response to protests, Richland County, South Carolina's Sheriff Lott pointed out on the one hand that "his department aims to maintain trust and transparency with the community;" on the other hand,

While Lott said the militarized response of the police in Ferguson was not the thing to do, he said the Richland County Sheriff’s Department owns every piece of equipment – for land, sea and air – that has been seen in response to the protests and looting in Ferguson.

So in other words, as long as he displays his officers in their tactical body armor and his MRAP and assault weapons at churches and fairs, we should feel confident that all this military equipment is going to be used to protect us.  And I am afraid that in America in the 21st century, that deluded attitude has been accepted.  We've become extras in a Die Hard movie, sans Bruce Willis and wisecracks, waving flags as we wait for the parade, excited by the big blue tank, just before the violence begins.

And some of us are fighting this treacherous wave, because we know if an officer of the peace can shoot an unarmed man reaching for his driver's license for a seat belt violation, an undertrained and unnecessary S.W.A.T. team will someday be more than willing to assume the need to use those big old expensive weapons in a neighborhood like yours.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2014/08/18/3626866_richland-sheriff-lott-police-handling.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

War at Home

I have been away for awhile.  I found that it seemed I was writing the same old over and over again.  No new information, no new perspectives.  It has been nice being a member of the uninformed public.  Also, when I got back not a thing had changed -- except that somebody told me gay marriage is now legal in South Carolina, which I guess would be earth-shattering news if it were true.

The "riots" in St. Louis are related to George Zimmerman being handed his gun and set free with the blessing of the NRA and the KKK.  And the Zimmerman outrage is related to the fact that Columbia, SC, last year bought a tank from the federal government.

Rachel Maddow last night had an excellent retrospective on the shootings at Kent State in 1970.  But then she went farther back, to the campus protest in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1967, when Vietnam protests were turned over from local campus police to city police, ending in 65 people hospitalized.

After that, Madison hired a new chief of police, David Cooper, who in his long career there successfully demilitarized the police force, and began what is now called "community policing."

I urge you to read The Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko.  He paints a gruesome picture of how police departments in small communities in this country over the past decade have become armed.  Just as the US is supplying their favored sides in battles in the Middle East, they are also arming our communities.  And what they are being armed for is not fighting neighborhood crime, but for war.

Here are the priorities in the nation today:  we do not have money to spend on education, on housing, on psychotherapy.  We do have unlimited amounts to spend on arms and prisons.  And the citizens of our country are the ones who have chosen these priorities, because they are the ones who are voting.  They may be voting out of ignorance, they are certainly vulnerable to the hysterical fear-mongering of Fox News and the NRA, but the fact remains, we voters have chosen.

The reason we voters choose an armed America is because we believe that only the bad guys will get hurt.  But the battering rams are not shattering the houses of drug lords, but homes of individuals who may have their small stash of pot.  They aren't going after cartels, but people enjoying poker night.

Don't believe it?  Neither do most of us, because it is too horrendous to consider.

But there are a couple of truisms about this situation.  First, there is the supply of weapons.  Then there is the fact that we will pay for the toys, but not for the training.  And then there is the fact that the police have gone from those who live in the community and are hired to protect us, to those with too much firepower, too little training, and who believe that they need to be constantly vigilant, in order to protect themselves.

And of course, police violence like that going on in Ferguson, Missouri, won't be likely to happen in suburban white communities.  We have over the past several years, been fed racist attitudes that have allowed black teenagers to be targeted.  It may be that Michael Brown stole cigars from a convenience store, but maybe not.  He may have pushed the officer, but maybe not.  Whatever he did do, he was unarmed, and shot eight times.

This is not our system of justice.  This is a national corrosion of values, evident in "stop and frisk" and "papers, please."  Where guns are not just allowed but welcomed, because politicians and, yes, our courts, don't really have a clue about the second amendment but prefer to sow seeds of fear across the country, and quash state and individual rights to protect themselves through peaceful measures.  In fact, the second amendment has become somewhat like a Rorschach Test, reflecting just how power hungry and paranoid we are.

This time, though, there were journalists -- white journalists -- who got caught in the tear gas and the rubber bullets and the jailing.  It was a middle class, conservative campus in 1970 where the murders of four unarmed students forced the nation to look at its war on its young citizens.  I am hoping that the media, because members of its own were caught in the crosshairs of a militant police action, will pick up this fight.  Because we are looking at a future with tanks and assault weapons, where people are watched from cameras on the street corners, and are guilty until proven innocent, or maybe until killed. 

The Other Side of the Gun Control Debate

First of all, I'm not going to talk about Newtown.  It was a tragedy that resulted a year ago in the killing of twenty children, and was followed by the abomination of lobbying that has prevented -- a year later -- the gun control that the American people were calling for.

And I'm not here to talk about the "other side" of the debate that pretends to make the 2nd Amendment about a right handed down by God and our founding fathers for all of us to be able to be armed to the teeth.

The other side of the argument that all us citizens need to be armed has a great deal to do with how armed our police have become.  While we weren't looking, we went from the creation of well trained SWAT teams to be used in cases of extreme threat to small town SWAT teams with military weaponry and little training who are very excited about using their new toys.

We're not talking about breaking into houses that hold caches of weapons, nor are we talking about busting large drug cartels, although we hear plenty about it on the rare occasion that it happens.  The invasions into private homes today are nearly always about finding small amounts of drugs, often for private use, or breaking up friendly poker games.  Damage is done to homes, pets are shot.  The terror is coming, today, from our own police forces.

And far too often, those SWAT raids happen at the wrong address, or with misinformation that has not been adequately corroborated.

We hear about our police on the front lines risking their lives as though our neighborhoods were war zones.  We have come to accept that innocents can be harassed, homes broken into, without warrants, without warning, because otherwise drugs might be flushed, guns might be used against the police in the time it takes to assure citizens their rights.

Community policing should be, and once was, intended to be a friendly police presence in the community.  Today it has become an "us against them" mentality, wherein the police in the community need to be on the lookout for all of us citizens, who may be breaking the law.  The crimes we are suspected of range from carrying dope to looking like an illegal immigrant.

We may be thinking that "stop and frisk" is on its way out in New York, but that remains to be seen.  Despite the polite phraseology, Arizona's "papers, please" law has resulted in increased harassment by and fear of the local police.

A few years ago, my daughter, then an undergraduate at a university in another state, commented that while there were unsolved rapes in the college community, police presence was high but more often associated with random stops for suspicion of driving under the influence than for preventing dangerous criminal activity.  And where the police force has a SWAT team, while bulletproof vests and military weaponry might allow some police to feel safer, they are likely to use that force against small or questionable crimes.  If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.  

Radley Balko has written quite a bit about the militarization of our police.  His book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces,  is extensively researched and an essential component in understanding America's fixation on fire power.  We may all believe that the police need that weaponry to protect themselves from criminals, but what if the criminals are perceived to be us?  What is the cost, in lives, in quality of life, in dollars, to protect police whose primary duty once was to protect us?

As the police escalate their war against those suspected criminals among us, the pressure is on to defend ourselves, isn't it?  Maybe the solution to all this obsession with guns and defense is a de-escalation on both sides.

What?  You think I'm being paranoid?  Overreacting?  How about a $658,000 armored vehicle designed to "protect SWAT team officers... from dangerous confrontations?"  You may think we don't need one here, but now that Columbia has one, maybe Charleston is next in line.  After all, here in South Carolina we may not want those federal Medicaid dollars, but you never know when you might need a tank to break up one of those illegal poker games.