I lived near Ferguson for 12 years. I drove an ice cream truck up and down its streets for two summers. I seriously considered renting an apartment in Canfield Green, the complex Michael Brown lived in, in 2012. So I can say, on reasonable personal authority, that media portrayals of Ferguson as some kind of crime-plagued racial ghetto are baloney. Ferguson is, or at least was, an eminently peaceful community.

American “police forces” of today, on the other hand, are de facto military organizations, occupying the communities they claim to “protect and serve.” They are part and parcel of a political system which, by its very nature, evolves continuously toward complete control of everyone and everything – the exact opposite of anything having to do with “peace.”

Feed 44:

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• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
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• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

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The most obvious statement to make at the outset is that neither jaywalking nor suspicion of petty theft nor running away from cops are crimes punishable by death anywhere in the United States. The fact that Mike Brown was killed for one of those three things is outrageous, and people were rightfully angry about it. But that isn’t everything at work in Ferguson. The demography of the town is telling.

According to data taken from the US Census Bureau and a handful of news reports, roughly 64 percent of Ferguson’s population of 21,203 – 14,290 people – are black, yet its mayor, James Knowles, is white; five members of its six-person City Council are white; six of its seven school board officials are white; and out of the 53 sworn officers on the Ferguson Police Department, three – three! – are black.

There’s more. According to the Missouri Attorney General’s office, even though white people in Ferguson are statistically more likely to be found carrying “contraband” on their persons during police searches than black people, the latter are six times more likely to be stopped in their vehicles by local PD, 11 times more likely to be searched and 12 times more likely to be arrested.

Mike Brown’s murder served as a catalyst for an extensively racially profiled, harassed and disenfranchised population to attempt to fight back.

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• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
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• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

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Historian and political scientist Mark Neocleous explains that the “term Polizeistaat, usually translated as ‘police state,’ came into general English usage in the 1930s,” increasingly used at that time to describe totalitarian governments such as those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Still, Neocleous is quick to clarify that, notwithstanding this popular twentieth century usage, it presents a “historical problem” to the extent that it suggests a certain inappropriate picture of “the original ‘police states.’” Those original police states were, rather than brutal, totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, early predecessors to the modern welfare state, or Wohlfahrtsstaat.

Given these historical connections between the welfare state and the police state, we might revise our understanding beyond the twentieth century definition, broadening the concept to include not only the most extreme and draconian twentieth century tyrannies, but most, if not all, contemporary “administrative” states. Once we begin to understand these connections and the growth and development of the total state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, phenomena such as the murder of Michael Brown become easier to understand. Whether we call it the welfare state or the police state, the reality is that we live in an environment completely dominated by regimentation — coercive control over and regulation of almost every aspect of our lives

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

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The neoconservatives have one thing right; terrorism is a threat to America. They just don’t know who the real terrorists are. The real terrorists are in our neighborhoods — walking around in dark outfits wearing badges and toting military equipment.

And what do we get after nearly 50 years of police abuse and terror that has likely killed thousands of innocent people and ruined the lives of thousands more prompt? A review.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

Bitcoin tips welcome:

• 1N1pF6fLKAGg4nH7XuqYQbKYXNxCnHBWLB

August 22nd, around 5pm local time, a black man walking down LaCienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California, was surrounded by police, cuffed, searched for weapons and detained on a six-figure bail demand. Contrary to pop culture portrayals of police procedure (unless you remember FX’s “The Shield”), he was neither read his rights nor allowed to contact an attorney for several hours. He was held on suspicion in an armed bank robbery in the area, the suspect’s description being “tall, bald black male.”

That such a vague description would cover anyone from Shaquille O’Neal with a fresh shave to the local UPS driver? Unimportant to the cops. He’s tall, black and bald, close enough … until a look at the bank’s security tape proved that they had the wrong guy and they let him go.

What made this stick out like a sore thumb was who this wrong man was: Charles Belk, a producer/director and head of his own marketing company. Seeing him discuss his background and his encounter with these cops, I was reminded of the “If They Gunned Me Down” trend that emerged on Twitter after Mike Brown’s death, and what it said about respectability politics. If someone who seemingly ticks every box on what American society has deemed the Respectable Citizen Survey MULTIPLE times can be treated like this, imagine the outcome if he didn’t have such resources at his disposal — say, if he were a struggling actor or waited tables for a living.

The treatment that minorities get, particularly get in the US, whether they’re Charles Belks or Joe Blows, is part and parcel of a system that sees non-whites as an undifferentiated mass. In cities across the country, minorities are subjected to disproportionate stops and searches for drugs and weapons, typically treated more harshly by police and tend to “fit the (ridiculously vague) description” a lot. Given the history of racial profiling, police brutality and corruption, those carrying the badge of enforcement of an unjust order for the state are themselves suspects. The charges are thousands of counts of murder and millions of counts of assault, armed robbery, kidnapping and terrorism.

It’s certainly true that the post-9/11 security state and the Global War on Terror have flooded police forces with surplus military equipment, increased the prevalence of military cross-training (including “counter-terrorism” training by Israeli military personnel encouraging American police forces to view their communities in much the same way Israeli security forces view the Palestinians in Gaza).

But the roots of police militarization go back way further than 9/11 —  all the way back to the aftermath of insurrections by the black populations of major American cities in the 1960s and the American political elite’s desire to ensure that nothing like that ever happened again.

US presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon began creating an institutional framework to ensure that any such disorder in the future would be dealt with differently. This process culminated in DOD Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, aka “Garden Plot,” which involved domestic surveillance by the military, contingency plans for military cooperation with local police in suppressing local disorders, plans for mass preventive detention and joint exercises of police and the regular military. Frank Morales wrote in Cover Action Quarterly (“U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War at Home,” Spring-Summer 2000):

At first, the Garden Plot exercises focused primarily on racial conflict. But beginning in 1970, the scenarios took a different twist. The joint teams, made up of cops, soldiers and spies, began practicing battle with large groups of protesters. California, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, was among the most enthusiastic participants in Garden Plot war games. … Garden plot [subsequently] evolved into a series of annual training exercises based on contingency plans to undercut riots and demonstrations, ultimately developed for every major city in the United States. Participants in the exercises included key officials from all law enforcement agencies in the nation, as well as the National Guard, the military, and representatives of the intelligence community.

It was against this background that then-governor Reagan introduced the first SWAT teams in California.

When Reagan became president, he appointed Louis O. Giuffrida, who as head of the California Guard had enthusiastically participated in Garden Plot exercises under Reagan’s govenorship, to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In that role Giuffrida worked with Oliver North to draw up plans for martial law in the event of a “national emergency.” They worked together on the Readiness Exercises 1983 and 1984 (Rex-83 and Rex-84), which included mass detention of suspected “terrorist subversives” under the emergency provisions of Garden Plot.

The hypothetical civil disturbance/insurrection scenario these emergency exercises were supposed to be coping with was (ahem) a series of massive antiwar demonstrations in response to a U.S. military invasion of Central America. “North … helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad (Alfonso Chardy, “Reagan Aides and the ‘Secret’ Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987).

The militarization of local polic, and the encouragement of a police culture that viewed local communities (especially people of color in minority neighborhoods) as an occupied enemy populations, got further impetus from the War on Drugs, which was greatly intensified under the Reagan administration. By 1999 — well before the Global War on Terror — the phenomenon had progressed to the point that Diane Cecilia Weber wrote a Cato Institute paper titled “Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police Departments” (Briefing Paper No. 50).

Since 9/11, the problem has grown beyond Weber’s imagining. After Katrina the (largely black) flooded out portions of New Orleans got a demonstration of the same police hostility and aggression we’re witnessing today in Ferguson. It’s a safe guess that this is now the standard treatment to expect from local police in a community experiencing an “emergency” or (manufactured) “disturbance” of any kind.

Ultimately, what it boils down to is the government views its own people — particularly those of color — as the enemy. The question is how long we will tolerate it.

First, the good. Popular commentators have been offering insightful analysis of police militarization. Perhaps the most notable is John Oliver, whose bit on Ferguson and police militarization was informative, incisive, and darkly hilarious. Thanks to this sort of commentary, plenty of people who hadn’t even heard of police militarization until recently are now aware of why it’s a problem.

Anarchist commentators have offered particularly insightful analysis in the wake of Ferguson. Here at the Center for a Stateless Society Grant Mincy has linked the protests in Ferguson to a broader trend of revolutionary movements, Cory Massimino has called for the abolition of the police, David D’Amato has analyzed what makes the US a police state, and Ryan Calhoun has called on Ferguson to “embrace community chaos over police order.” Over at AntiWar.com, Dan Sanchez has also called for the abolition of police, correctly identifying them as occupying forces that undermine peace and security rather than upholding them.

But it’s important to remember that this isn’t primarily about a national conversation. It’s about people’s lives. The people of Ferguson are facing arrests, police involved shootings, raids, tear gas, and a warlike environment that prevents the peaceful social cooperation that supports human life. To mitigate this tragedy, it’s important for people within and outside Ferguson to cooperate to support those being harmed by state violence. One way to do this is supporting the legal defense fund for those arrested in the course of the protests. Another is supporting the Amnesty International team that is on the ground observing and documenting abuse. Directly supporting those acting on the ground is one example of the vibrant voluntary cooperation human beings engage in from the bottom up, even when the top down violence of the state tries to thwart these actions.

While we should support these sorts of direct and bottom up actions, we must be skeptical of top down reform proposals, no matter how well-intentioned. The danger of public awareness and conversation surrounding serious issues is that politicians will seize on it to pass reforms, and these top-down reforms may make the problem worse rather than better. To understand why reform can be dangerous, just examine the history of criminal justice reform. In a review [PDF] of prison abolitionist Dean Spade’s book Normal Life, Jennifer Levi and Giovanni Shay note various examples of criminal justice reforms that unintentionally resulted in expanded state power and violence:

It is not only prison abolitionists who share Spade’s concern about the unintended consequences of prison reform. The sociologist Heather Schoenfeld writes that prison-conditions litigation in Florida contributed to a prison building boom there. Other commentators–including James Jacobs, Malcolm Feeley, and Van Swearingen–argue that prisoners’ rights litigation contributed to the “bureaucratization” of prisons, consolidating administrators’ power even as it asserted prisoners’ rights.

Examples of double-edged US criminal punishment reforms extend well beyond prison conditions. As described by Kate Stith and Steve Y. Koh (in “The Politics of Sentencing Reform: The Legislative History of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines,” Wake Forest Law Review, 1993), some of the initial proponents of federal sentencing guidelines were liberal academics and judges, who wanted to rationalize sentencing to make it fairer and more consistent. Unfortunately, as innumerable commentators have recounted, the implementation of the guidelines produced draconian sentences, ultimately contributing to the growth of US prisons.

That second point about liberal intentions motivating the establishment of federal sentencing guidelines is particularly important, given how these one-size fits all sentencing policies have driven the dramatic growth of the American prison state. A recent report from the National Research Council on the growth of incarceration in the US identifies the replacement of indeterminate sentencing with top down sentencing guidelines as a key policy that contributed to increased incarceration. The authors note multiple criticisms of indeterminate sentencing from the left that helped contribute to this change, writing:

Criticisms of indeterminate sentencing grew. Judge Marvin Frankel’s (1973) Criminal Sentences—Law without Order referred to American sentencing as “lawless” because of the absence of standards for sentencing decisions and of opportunities for appeals. Researchers argued that the system did not and could not keep its rehabilitative promises (Martinson, 1974). Unwarranted disparities were said to be common and risks of racial bias and arbitrariness to be high (e.g., American Friends Service Committee, 1971). Critics accused the system of lacking procedural fairness, transparency, and predictability (Davis, 1969; Dershowitz, 1976). Others asserted that parole release procedures were unfair and decisions inconsistent (Morris, 1974; von Hirsch and Hanrahan, 1979).

So leftist critique of an unfair criminal justice system inadvertently helped make it more harsh and punitive. These and other examples of reforms gone wrong are vitally important to understand, because the current national attention focused on mass incarceration, police brutality, and police militarization produces opportunities for reforms. And these reforms have a high risk of making the problems of punitive state violence even worse.

One particularly troubling trend in the wake of Ferguson is the trend of liberals calling for increased gun control in order to reduce the supposed need for police militarization. Commentators including UCLA law professor Adam Winkler have claimed that the prevalence of guns in America helps motivate police militarization and gun control may be a solution. But as Daniel Bier points out, police militarization has risen over a period of time when gun ownership has declined, crime has declined, and violent attacks on police have declined. In addition to being at odds with the facts, Winkler’s proposal risks promoting laws that increase the punitive power of America’s criminal justice system. As I’ve written previously, gun control laws have fueled the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in this country.

It’s good that more people are paying attention and talking about police militarization. But we must remember that police militarization is impacting real individuals and we should start by directly supporting the individuals and communities impacted, not attempting top-down political solutions. We must always be careful of the pitfalls and unintended consequences that come with politically enacted reforms. Direct action should be preferred to political action, and our analysis and prescriptions should be both radical and cautious. Radical in critiquing the root causes and institutions that contribute to these problems, and cautious in always being wary of unintended consequences and never allowing good intentions to make us support destructive top-down plans.

It’s no surprise to those who understand the kind of perverse incentives inherent in government that it took until now for “something to be done.” And it shouldn’t be a surprise that that “something” is merely an attempt to appease the growing distrust and skepticism of police power rather than actually do anything about it.

This war against civilians by the police has been going on for a long time, though. A Radley Balko, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop,  writes, “There are two trends which began in the late 1960s and early 1970s that help explain how we got here: the rise of the SWAT team and the escalation of the War on Drugs.”

Militarized police forces are nothing new. They go back nearly 50 years, and only just now is the federal government saying something. To be clear, that’s all they are doing. Why would we expect anything to come of this review?

“The election of Ronald Reagan brought new funding, equipment, and a more active drug-policing role for the paramilitary SWAT units popping up across the country,” Balko continues. “Over the next decade, with prodding from the White House, Congress paved the way to widespread military style policing by carving out exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act.”

We can thank small government conservative Ronald Reagan for much of the militarization of local police in the past 30 years. I suppose he wasn’t that conservative on arming thugs and terrorizing harmless drug users.

The increasingly military-like local police forces have faced nearly no political resistance. It’s been a steady increase of military tactics and weapons. From 1980 to 2000, the number of SWAT teams increased by 1,400 percent. More than 80 percent of small town law enforcement agencies have SWAT teams; almost 90 percent in larger areas have them. Just in 2011, “50 states, 17,000+ federal, state and local agencies have accepted more than $2.6 billion in donated military equipment so far this year.”

Kurt Eichenwald writes, “Research by Professor Peter Kraska at Eastern Kentucky University shows that 80 percent of the paramilitary deployments by police departments were for ‘proactive’ applications — in other words, instances of police-initiated violence rather than in response to an unusual threat. The majority of these involved ‘no-knock’ and ‘quick-knock’ raids on private homes, searching for contraband like drugs, guns or cash.”

And what does all this ramped-up policing do? It creates more terror, more violence, and more death. Shocking, I know. In fact, you’re eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Yet I don’t see a “war on cops.”

The neoconservatives have one thing right; terrorism is a threat to America. They just don’t know who the real terrorists are. The real terrorists are in our neighborhoods — walking around in dark outfits wearing badges and toting military equipment.

And what do we get after nearly 50 years of police abuse and terror that has likely killed thousands of innocent people and ruined the lives of thousands more prompt? A review.

A review that’s probably just going to lower the amount of increase in spending on militarization and do nothing to address the real problem or save lives. White House staff and relevant U.S. agencies — including the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, will reportedly lead this review.

Yes, the very same Department of Defense that provides local law enforcement with surplus military equipment will be reviewing the militarization of police. Yes, the very same Homeland Security that has transformed the United States into a police state with the PATRIOT act and the NDAA, is going to be reviewing the militarization of police.

Superman comic books are more believable than this. But that is government for you.

Rather than providing local police forces with surplus equipment, the weapons should be used to destroy the other weapons. And then we should blow up those weapons. We should do this until the police (and the military) have no more weapons.

Perhaps my solution isn’t that likely to occur. But it’s more likely to solve the problem of police militarization than a government-conducted review.

Brown’s death at the hands of a Ferguson police officer provoked impassioned demonstrations and debates on police brutality and the very nature of policing in the United States, leading many observers to wonder if Americans are now living in a full-fledged police state.

But what is a “police state?” The phrase has become an almost commonplace feature of our conversation on police violence and militarization, a convenient way to give voice to growing fears about deteriorating civil liberties. The history of the phrase offers insight into its contemporary usage, a way to analyze the current situation in the United States and decide whether indeed we Americans now live under a police state.

Historian and political scientist Mark Neocleous explains that the “term Polizeistaat, usually translated as ‘police state,’ came into general English usage in the 1930s,” increasingly used at that time to describe totalitarian governments such as those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Still, Neocleous is quick to clarify that, notwithstanding this popular twentieth century usage, it presents a “historical problem” to the extent that it suggests a certain inappropriate picture of “the original ‘police states.’” Those original police states were, rather than brutal, totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, early predecessors to the modern welfare state, or Wohlfahrtsstaat.

Given these historical connections between the welfare state and the police state, we might revise our understanding beyond the twentieth century definition, broadening the concept to include not only the most extreme and draconian twentieth century tyrannies, but most, if not all, contemporary “administrative” states. Once we begin to understand these connections and the growth and development of the total state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, phenomena such as the murder of Michael Brown become easier to understand. Whether we call it the welfare state or the police state, the reality is that we live in an environment completely dominated by regimentation — coercive control over and regulation of almost every aspect of our lives.

Historically and theoretically, it is impossible to disentangle the welfare aspects of the modern total state from its police functions. Just as the progressive, administrative state gave rise to a growing class of professional bureaucrats, so too did it increasingly professionalize — and correspondingly militarize — police forces. The language of expertise, efficiency and specialization provided the rationale for the modern state’s systematic establishment of professional police. Such professional police forces, unlike earlier forms of community protection, were intentionally quasi-military in character, instructed to occupy, study and control the policed communities, to make policing a fully developed science with its own methodologies and techniques.

Market anarchism is an argument for a more free society, one in which power is divided to the greatest possible extent and provision of important services such as defense is not monopolized, but left to the peaceful push and pull of voluntary trade and cooperation. Monopolies, insofar as they are exempt from competitive pressures, lend themselves to abuses of power like the contemptible crime that took Michael Brown’s young life. Brown’s murder is not an aberration susceptible to remedy through better police training. It is rather a predictable symptom of the underlying disease that is the United States’s authoritarian police state, the treatment of which is to eliminate professional policing as a coercive monopoly and thus to end the impunity that officers currently enjoy.

“But what would you do with all the psychopaths and violent people?”

This is perhaps the most common question posed to anarchists. After all, most people view the state and its monopoly on force as the method by which society handles the psychopaths and violent people. To answer the question, we first have to analyze the current “solution”: The police.

The situation in Ferguson is an example of some of the most extreme, egregious measures taken by police as of late. But an understanding of the kind of culture statism promotes leads to the conclusion that Ferguson is merely a symptom of a growing disease that is sweeping the United States.

Statism normalizes the initiation of violence and the violation of people’s most basic human rights. Elections that serve millions of people’s property and civil liberties on a platter to the biggest special interest group makes the destruction of human rights commonplace. A military industrial complex that creates hate abroad and encourages racist, xenophobic nationalism at home makes literal bombings just a part of every day life. And worst of all, the militarization of police creates generations of obedient serfs who live in fear of strangers roaming the streets in dark colored outfits reminiscent of gangs with weapons that can blow you away in one unaccountable, shot … or worse.

The Ferguson police are crushing the right to free speech, imposing curfews and threatening protesters and journalists with violence. And I thought anarchy was chaos.

Why does this continue to happen? Simple. Because they have the most guns — because they have a monopoly.

Police are not efficient because they don’t rely on customers’ voluntary support. They aren’t held accountable because they face no serious threat of losing power. They are abusive because citizens have two choices: Obey or suffer the punishment. They are militarized because they don’t operate on the profit and loss mechanism of the freed market and have an endless trough of stolen taxpayer money to waste.

If the police monopoly was broken up, the police as we know them would no longer exist. Private defense agencies, communal associations, neighborhood watch groups and mutual aid societies would take the place of state “defense.” While they would serve the end of protecting citizens, like the police claim to do, these organizations would likely look far different from modern local police forces.

Police forces are insulated from competition, market feedback, the price mechanism and the profit-loss system. As monopolies, they come with incentives to overspend, overcharge, under-produce, and generally work in opposition to the consumers’ interests and in favor of their own.

But firms and organizations that spontaneously arise on a freed market out of voluntary exchange are subject to market forces every step of the way. They must serve the consumers’ interests – they must produce a worthwhile product at an affordable cost or be crushed by competition. Being in the business of defense, they must minimize costly, violent conflict and pursue cheaper, peaceful solutions or else be out-competed by other organizations that better serve their customer’s interests.

Since these organizations would be at constant risk of losing business to competition, unlike the police, their methods and tactics would be completely different. They would have to respect their customers’ rights if they ever want their business. The agencies that better protect rights would be the most profitable and the ones that violate peoples’ rights would be quickly pushed out of the market.

So what would we do with all the psychopaths and violent criminals? We wouldn’t give them a platform insulated from market competition that allows them to threaten, arrest, spy on, torture, aggress against, and control other people. Namely, we wouldn’t give them a police force.