Tell the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice: Stop funding the siege on communities of color.
By American Civil Liberties Union
Last week, local police fatally shot an unarmed African-American 18-year-old named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In the days that followed, there have been massive protests in Ferguson and heavily armed SWAT teams are roaming the streets in response. Our communities are not warzones.
And yet the police, armed to the teeth, treat us like the enemy, especially if we’re black, young, poor or homeless. Tanks are rolling through our towns. What will it take for police to start protecting communities of color, not waging war on them?
The Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice are funneling billions of dollars to state and local law enforcement agencies every year to help them purchase military weaponry and equipment. What business do DOD, DHS, and DOJ have funding a war here at home?
With our country’s long history of aggressive policing in communities of color, it shouldn’t surprise us that these wartime tools and tactics are hitting poor and black neighborhoods hardest. To start undoing the damage, the feds need to stop funding this war.
Good policing is about trust, which has been severely eroded through the use of excessive force and police brutality. If police forces across America continue to militarize and treat communities of color as the enemy, they will increasingly be seen as an occupying army.
Stopping the funding and incentivizing of police militarization is a crucial first step to ending this war.
Tell the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice: Stop funding the siege on communities of color.
Go here to sign the petition.
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Whether we like it or not, our communities ARE war zones. How else do we account for a black man being killed by cops and vigilantes every 28 hours? How else do we account for more black men in prison than were enslaved in 2008? How else do we account for the fact that one in four American women will be raped in her lifetime? How else do we account for the fact that in San Diego a solid percentage of rape perpetrators are…cops? How else do we account for 100 – 200 species a day going extinct? How else do we account for carcinogens in every mother’s breast milk? How else do we account for the 250 trees – with lives as valuable to them as your life is valuable to you – cut down around the world a second?
Our communities ARE war zones. It is only through great privilege that we are allowed to think that they are not.
I support every effort to undermine the power of the police, but we cannot downplay the severity of what is going on. This plays right back into the hands of our oppressors and entrenches the violence being delivered upon us by hiding it.
In the case of this position the ACLU is talking literal war zones. They’re demanding an end to militarization of our communities. Those other things you mention are issues that need to be dealt with as well but are not specific to cops having tanks and other tools of war.
Military weaponry in police hands says so much about us.
Firstly, so-called conservatives who squall against federal power can tolerate very nicely that same government when it arms local police forces with killing machines .
Secondly, the military weapons are not called out when so-called conservative Cliven Bundy decides to occupy federal lands and calls the white militias to help him with that act of defiance.
Inconvenient truths about violence seem more and more to have surrounded so-called conservatives. When do we get to call ’em what they are?
There’s also the economic side to the militarization of local police.
Federal war agencies spend billions of tax dollars on armaments. What to do with all that surplus when we pull out of the foreign wars? Why sell them overseas when the Feds can simply recycle them here at home! They give grants to the local police forces; then that money comes back to the federal level to buy the war materiel.
It’s really very brilliant.
So what do you guys think of this?: link to video
It’s not in my place to say one way or the other but I do think he overlooks that fact that police departments in general of become quite overzealous.
Any website that’s got Chuck Norris on the front page is just right wing crap.
True it is a right wing site, but what did you think of the vid itself?
the guy is being used by right wingers so they can say “look, we found a black person….”