Militarized Police State

The video of the pepper-spraying of student #Occupy protesters by University of California-Davis campus police in riot gear was a real eye-opener.  When I went to college, the campus police were un-uniformed and as far as I knew un-armed.  Their main function seemed to be ferreting out girls in dorm rooms after curfew.

Now they might be cruising around in armored personnel carriers.  Since 1997 the Department of Defense has given away more than 2½ billion dollars of excess equipment to 17,000+ state and local law enforcement agencies including body armor, night vision gear, assault rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles, helicopters, riverboats and robots.  The Department of Homeland Security has a grant program under which law enforcement agencies can acquire even more equipment.

The Texas Department of Public Safety has its own surveillance drones.

In October, California’s Alameda County Sheriff’s Department hosted Urban Shield, an annual training exercise  to coordinate responses to a terror attack or natural disaster in the Bay Area.  The exercise, which included a 50-hour SWAT competition on the UC-Berkeley campus, was attended by police teams from the US and other countries, notably Israel, which as “the Harvard of antiterrorism” has had a major influence on how US police handle civilians.

A month later, Oakland and UC-Berkeley #Occupiers were overpowered by police who had participated in the exercise.

As the police become more militarized, the military becomes more involved in law enforcement.

In 2008, US Northern Command, which was added to the military’s combatant commands after 9/11 to defend the US homeland, acquired its first active army unit, a brigade combat team assigned to the command’s US Army North.  The unit, designated a Consequence Management Response Force, is being trained in “crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.”  Army Times, however, emphasized that the training is only for “war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.”

“Not for any domestic purpose” is to steer clear of the Posse Comitatus Act.  Enacted in 1878 after Congress ended Reconstruction and withdrew federal troops from the South, the Act prohibits the use of the US Army for law enforcement – “executing the laws” -- unless “expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress.”

The major act of Congress that expressly authorizes federal troops to execute federal and state laws is the Insurrection Act of 1807.  Earlier legislation, particularly the Militia Act of 1795, authorized the President to call up State militias (now called the National Guard) in case of rebellion against a State, if the State legislature or governor so requested, or in case US laws could not be enforced.  The 1807 Act allowed the President to use the army and navy in any case where calling up the militia was authorized.

The Civil Rights Act of 1871, aimed at the Ku Klux Klan, extended the power of the President to use militia and federal forces to any “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that deprived people in a State of their constitutional rights or obstructed US laws.

All this legislation, still quaintly referred to as the Insurrection Act of 1807, endured without significant change for the last 130 years until an amendment to it was buried in the Defense Authorization Act of 2007.  With an eye to Hurricane Katrina, recent flu epidemics and 9/11, Congress greatly enlarged the President’s authority to use armed forces for law enforcement by extending it to “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition” leading to domestic violence that local authorities cannot control.

Now, as we speak, a bipartisan Congress is about to complete the militarization of our National Police State by putting the military in charge of terrorism with the authority, say two retired Marine generals, to “indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil.”  The Marines, a former Commandant and a former commander of Central Command, urged President Obama to veto the legislation (which Obama has molded to his satisfaction) because it “would extend the battlefield to include the United States – and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.”

We might bear in mind that the terrorists with whom our National Police State is obsessed are mostly nonstate actors who rarely get loose in the US or, if home-grown, are rarely beyond surveillance.  Since real terrorists are scarce, police agencies are honing their new military skills on largely peaceful #Occupiers and students.  Whom are they protecting?

Terrorists have been prosecuted by US civil authorities in accordance with the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, but not successfully by the US military.  Turning people whom the President suspects of being terrorists over to the military subjects them to preventive detention under martial law with no right of habeas corpus.  Whom will that protect?