Militarising the police from Oakland to NYC

If the infrastructure of a police state is created, it’s only a matter of time before those aggressive powers are used.

The US has actually been militarising much of its police agencies for the better part of three decades, mostly in the name of the drug war. But 9/11 put that programme on steroids.

It was one of the greatest expansions of government police power in history, an expansion which, after some tweaking, has been mostly validated by the congress and reaffirmed by the courts.

Campus police with M-16s

More often, it created new surveillance opportunities for non-terrorist activity. In one notorious case from 2006, it was revealed that Homeland Security had given the remote Alaskan village of Dillingham (population 2,400) $202,000 to purchase surveillance cameras in order to track alleged terrorist activity.

‘Pain compliance’

The Soft-Kill Solution – New Frontiers In Pain Compliance“. He recounts a 60 Minutes investigation into a new weapon to be used for what the military said was “crowd control in Iraq”.

The idea that sometimes the threat was so great that authorities had no choice but to set aside even deep cultural taboos was promulgated by the most powerful people in the nation.

Today we are in a different world.

Economic justice

Certainly the government seems to have been preparing for such confrontations for some time now.

We have essentially normalised torture and created a high-tech police apparatus with more capability than any military in history. Human nature suggests that if you build it, they will use it.

Heather Digby Parton writes the liberal political blog Hullabaloo.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

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Al Jazeera