The Military Must be De-Funded Along with the Police - Dan Kovalik

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EXCERPT:



Democratic President Bill Clinton opened the door wide for this police militarization in the 1990s with the National Defense Authorization Act which created a program, the 1033 program, through which police departments are given surplus military equipment. As recently explained by Michael Shank in an article in The New York Review of Books, entitled “How Police Became Paramilitaries,” pursuant to this program, “local law enforcement began to adopt the type of military equipment more frequently used in a war zone: everything from armored personnel carriers and tanks, with 360-degree rotating machine gun turrets, to grenade launchers, drones, assault weapons, and more. Today, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment—most used, some new—has been transferred to civilian police departments.”

And, once the police receive this equipment, they must use it.



As Shank explains, the 1033 program “requires that law enforcement agencies make use of such equipment within a year of acquisition, effectively mandating that police put it into practice in the public space.” In other words, the police are actually required to turn the military’s high-tech guns against their own people.



The militarization of the police, moreover, can be seen as a
by-product of the US’s over-reliance on the use of military force and
war to solve all of its problems, to the near exclusion of all other
alternatives. Indeed, the US has given up on trying to lead the world
through economic and technological prowess, or through moral suasion.
Instead, our leaders have decided that brute military force alone will
allow the US to dominate the planet, and our nation’s coffers are being
looted to the tune of over $1 trillion a year to do so. The result is
the starving of our educational system, our social safety net and our
nation’s vital infrastructure. This, of course, then leads to mass
deprivation and despair which then leads to mass unrest. And, just as it
deals with the rest of the world, our rulers have decided to deal with
the unrest at home, not by solving the social ills plaguing this nation,
or by fixing a few bridges or dams, but by beating us down with
military-style violence.




Military force, indeed, has become the only instrument in our
government’s toolbox, as quite starkly illustrated recently by the White
House’s decision to give our valuable medical workers military flyovers
costing $60,000 an hour instead of providing these workers with the
protective equipment they have been desperately demanding. As with all
things, our government has money and resources for instruments of
violence, but none for human needs. This is literally killing us, just
as surely as it is killing hundreds of thousands of people – nearly all
people of color, not coincidentally – in foreign lands. The fight
against police brutality and racism must therefore be linked to the
fight to de-fund our military and to the broader fight to de-militarize
our very society and culture.