Cold War Crusades birthed US Militarization of Police

Referring to article in Jacobin Magazine : “Police Know Guerrilla Ware-fare.” By Kyle Burke

Militarization of police refers to the use of military equipment and tactics by law enforcement officers. As stated in the article: “When Americans encounter cops, they also encounter armored personnel carriers, M4 rifles, noise-based crowd control devices, rubber-coated metal pellets, and tear gas.” These are military grade weapons & equipment, so why do cops have to approach civilians in such a combative way? Why should taxpayer money fund the militarization of police? Does it make us safer as Americans? The answer is no. Statistics show that by a listing creating by Global Peace Ranking that the United States didn’t even make it into the Top 10 safest countries: The United States currently ranks 128th in the Global Peace Ranking. So, to say the least we are not safer. Yet our congress writes checks for Billions in Military Defense spending. Why are we wasting tax payer dollars? This article was written by Kyle Burke and was published in a Democratic Socialist Magazine called Jacobin. He states that: Each year, law enforcement conducts over 10 million arrests, resulting in more than 600,000 admissions to state or federal prisons. These activities cost taxpayers over $126 billion each year for federal, state, and local police protection. True reckoning with cost and consequences of police militarization, mass incarceration and racial disparities cannot focus on USA alone. Because American policing has shaped and been shaped by forces that transcend the nation, our ability to transform the globe-spanning system depends on us knowing how it came into being.”

Kyle Burks gives a detailed historical context that shows how policing and counterinsurgency morphed into each other. Counterinsurgency: organized military activity designed to combat rebellion. He focused on the peak years of the Cold War, roughly the 1950s through the early 1970s.” During the Cold War Crusades, defeating communism was the US goal domestically and abroad. By 1946, CIA agent, Byron Engle, was shipped off to Japan, for his first tour abroad. Joining General Douglas MacArthur’s command, Engle worked to rebuild and reform Japan’s police forces at a time when the US started to build relations with countries that were once enemies and had become allies. With the agenda being to protect the US special interest in fighting communism by creating more efficient police forces in those countries. Officials like Engle treated crime and communism as the same thing, a risk to the establishment. To defeat communism, the US would go into those poor countries and ensure that they had enough time to transition into a more mature economy, so then the country could create a capitalist society. Of which the US would benefit from…Of course!

After success in several countries overseas, Byron Engle went on to become Director of The Office of Public Safety. OPS would also play a key role in driving tough on crime legislation and become the center sponsor of police training in America and abroad. From 1968-1975 in Vietnam OPS agents worked with the CIA Phoenix Program, an assassination operation that killed more than 20,000 people and ran a torture facility at an island prison. While during that same time period right here at home, Congress passed the 1968 Omnibus crime control and safe streets act. That legislation extracted key parts of the counterinsurgency strategy overseas and shot them into American policy. The bill authorized $400 Million of Federal funding to go to law enforcement it also ushered in a tough on crime era that would give credence to future tough on crime bills as well as establish a precedence of incarceration over rehabilitation. Thus, birthing an era of counterinsurgency and militarization of police not only in America but also in foreign countries that we had a special interest. And starting a domino effect of “Law & Order” politics. During those decades, cops at home and military personnel overseas exchanged methods and tactics to ward out authoritarianism and prevent leftist rebellions. The author discuses in the article a new account of the War on Crime and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic control.  It is a problem that the war on communism is a mirror of the war on terrorism and that it seems as if the US has propped up these Wars through fear of communism and/or terrorism and has used counterinsurgency as a tactic to justify US self-interest.

 But in 2020 there is a rising agenda of social movements that argue against militarization and authoritarianism. Whether it is the Democratic Socialist movement crying “No War, No Empire” or Black Lives Matter movement drawing national attention to police killings of unarmed black Americans, including Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, and Yvette Smith in 2014. We must educate ourselves and others on how militarization began and realize that there is a connection to current events in and outside the US. It was used as a technique to fight communism after the Cold War Era and to establish US dominance abroad. After its success overseas, it was put into legislation in the form of Anti-Crime bills to maintain the order of the current establishment right here at home, i.e. (The War on Drugs). Once communism was not seen as a threat, the threat evolved into the (War on Terror), the war we are currently still involved in. To solve the problem, we must discuss the past and present imperialism of America and look at it through an objective lens. If America deployed as many street outreach workers as we do police, then we could assist citizens in a better way then we are now. We could deescalate tensions by using peace officers and SOWs here and abroad to resolve civil problems in the community before they turn criminal or aggressive. We could put emphasis on rehabilitation and solving the root issues of crime in America and abroad like poverty and mental health. But if history teaches us anything, the US will continue down a war path of destruction, repression & self-inflicted conflict. Capitalisms love of the almighty dollar and its pursuit of power is still as American as Apple pie. & I the words of Martin Luther King, until we realized that: “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.” Then we as a country will remain in a militarized police state.