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Why the Surprise at Police Violence?
For those who are acquainted with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the police in many places in the US South were often part of the far-right and murderous Ku Klux Klan. The most famous example of this was the collusion of the police in the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were arrested on false charges while in the process of investigating a church burning during Freedom Summer in 1964. They were held in jail while the Klan could arrange the details of the car chase that led to their torture and execution.
Those of us who protested the viciousness of the Vietnam War and the larger wars in Southeast Asia with its mass murder of civilians were not surprised when the war came home, so to speak, and Chicago police rioted and viciously attacked protesters at the Democratic Party’s convention in August 1968. A footnote to the antiwar movement, like the civil rights movement, is that the FBI was involved in the repression of protest through the COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) program. An objectionable and laughable rewriting of history is the movie Mississippi Burning (1988) that depicted FBI agents as supportive of the civil rights movement. Its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was a dyed-in-the-wool racist. He hated both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, as he did the Vietnam-era antiwar movement and its leaders. He was the consummate homophobe, although the latter may have been part of his self-hatred of his sexual identity, if indeed he had any.
Following the Vietnam era of protest against war, police were brought into a system overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide a national communication system in the event of another outpouring of protest taking place in the US.
Last summer (2023), a town official, working as a private property manager, told me that “You’re known to the police,” during a dispute over the removal of tree stumps. When I called the local police chief to find out if in fact this was true, I never received a return call. The latter is more than disturbing given my personal history of protest. This does not mean that the police acting in a civic role can’t be of help. But police in the US, at the local, state, and federal level (FBI) can also monitor and thwart protest, as the New York Police Department did during an antiwar rally in Brooklyn, New York this past weekend where peaceful protesters were violently beaten without provocation, part of the ongoing repression of protest against the Israel-Gaza war.
The next major transformation of the police came with the militarization of police and the role of police as part of the conduit for Black and Brown people into the system of mass incarceration in the US. The militarization of police accompanied the role of the US as the police of the world in the wars that accelerated from Reagan to Biden. Equipment used to enrich the military-industrial-investment apparatus was also dumped into local police departments across the country and generally used to monitor and repress poor communities that have been economically decimated by the accelerated deindustrialization resulting from a globalized economy. That destabilization shook the working class and some in the middle class. The police response to the protest resulting from the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is but one example of police reacting violently. The murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland is one of many others. Police show up to these outbreaks of civil unrest looking like the legions from the Star Wars movies. Even a casual observer might be alarmed by tanks on US streets to quell unrest.
The video of people like Eric Garner have morphed across the Internet as police repress and kill Black and Brown people for, in Garner’s case, the crime of selling loosies on Staten Island in New York. These murders across the US are committed with abandon by police. All the police need to do is claim they felt threatened and they’re generally exonerated.
Training of police, who may feel threatened and commit murder in the so-called line of duty, is of great concern given the police violence against protesters on college and university campuses protesting the Israel-Gaza war and recently on the streets of Brooklyn, New York (Guardian, May 20, 2024). Police in the US are generally not well trained and the economic, political, and social systems in the US support the police to maintain order and create a business as usual society without the slightest inclination toward justice.
I had direct interaction with the police in 1973 as a war resister. The details of my case are recounted in my memoir Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017, revised 2023 ) available at Amazon.
Why the Surprise at Police Violence?