aljazeera | the roots of the police violence seen in Ferguson go well beyond the
Israel-Palestinian conflict. They lie in Vietnam, inner-cities and the
farmlands of California's Central Valley. The militarization of police
and the concomitant view that treats minority communities as enemies
needing to be pacified rather than citizens to be served professionally
began in the 1960s with the confluence of four factors.
First, the assertiveness of the civil rights movement, particularly
the shift toward black militancy after urban riots in several black
neighborhoods such as Watts, led major urban police departments to
search for more powerful tools to control and pacify potentially
insurgent populations. Second, the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency
tactics employed in Vietnam were brought to bear on the “urban jungles”
and the growing anti-war movement, which was considered a major threat
to the ongoing prosecution of the war. Third, the government felt the
need to police the growing movement for labor rights, as epitomized by
the response to the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) strikes in Delano,
California, in 1965.
In fact, a special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team was used for the
very first time against the Cesar Chavez–led UFW strike of 1965. The
deployment inspired Darryl Gates, then an inspector at the Los Angeles
Police Department, to push for making SWAT a major part of his unit. It
laid a solid foundation for the rise of militarized policing in the
United States.
Fourth, the war on drugs, which was launched in 1971 by president
Richard Nixon and focused on communities that were already targeted by
SWAT teams; the law and order ethos of the Reagan era, which led to the
(increasingly privatized) prison industrial complex; and the
militarization of the U.S. southern border with the rise of
anti-immigrant hysteria exacerbated militarized policing, with truly damaging results for American society.
The concept gained even more momentum after 9/11. In 1985 only one
quarter of cities with more than 25,000 inhabitants had SWAT teams. By
2005 this number had grown to more than 80 percent,
conducting more than 50,000 annual raids, in part because the federal
government requires the military equipment given to municipal police
departments be used within one year or returned.
