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

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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.

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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.

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.

For example, I mentioned the evolution of professional law enforcement officers from being a sort of permanent civic militamen or town watch, salaried officers who got paid to exercise full-time the same posse comitatus rights possessed by ordinary citizens, to possessing an order of authority entirely different from that of the ordinary citizen (hence the popularity in the press of the gag-inducing term “the authorities”).

This is a reversal of the progressive development celebrated by Henry Sumner Maine in “Ancient Law,” the evolution from societies governed by status to societies based on contract. The Prussianized deference to anyone in uniform is a regression to society based on status, with titled nobilities whose aura of authority ultimately derived from conquest by the sword. When those in uniform possess status as a caste, and not as individuals, it’s a sign we’re returning to a society of stations or estates, rather than of free and equal individuals whose obligations derive entirely from voluntary agreement.

Lest anyone think this is hyperbole, Keith Taylor (a PhD student in community economic development at the University of Illinois) has this interesting anecdote from his trip back from a cooperative conference in Washington:

There were two soldiers on the plane. When we landed and “parked,” this dude behind me says in a loud voice “I was hoping that the cockpit crew would ask everyone to remain seated so you gentlemen could get off the plane first and reconnect with your families right away.” Myself and others acted like we didn’t hear his pandering. He then utters audibly “I guess no one is going to respect these guys.”

Then, as if he can’t handle it, he shouts out “would y’all please stand aside out of respect to the returning soldiers to let them get to their families as soon as they get off the plane?”

At least the guy wasn’t snatching food off the trays in-flight to feed “our hungry heroes.” Classic example of showing one’s belly to ingratiate oneself to the alpha male. “I, for one, welcome our new uniformed overlords.”

I cringe when I hear the words “thank you for your service.” I’m sure that many people in military uniform joined out of a sincere, albeit misguided, belief that that the wars they were fighting were in some sense to defend American lives and freedom.  But it’s utterly nonsensical.

Every time I hear someone say the troops in Iraq are “fighting for your right” to do this or that, or “fighting for our freedom,” I have to restrain myself from going ballistic.

Gary Trudeau even (even?) got into the act. In a recent Doonesbury strip, the wounded Iraq vet kid with the stutter told one of the open-carry people at Starbucks “I spent two years behind an M-60 defending your right to be a moron about guns.” No kidding? How exactly would those guys’ rights to pack heat at Starbucks have been threatened if Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq?

I think “freedom,” among the “100% Americans” set, is about like “Freiheit” in Nazi propaganda: devoid of content. “Freedom” is just whatever the government’s “protecting” by its wars, by definition.

As Bush said after 9-11, every time we go shopping we’re proving that we’re still a free society. Excuse me? I must have missed the place in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich where Hitler tried to discourage good Germans from going shopping. Real freedom isn’t about doing the kind of stuff government wants us to do. Real freedom is about doing stuff the government doesn’t like, without being wiretapped or herded into a “free speech zone.”

I guess all foreign wars are about the “defense of our freedoms” in one sense: by definition, there aren’t as many troops still at home to threaten our freedoms (unless the government hires some folks from Blackwater or Pinkerton to do it instead).

For example, the state’s functionaries expect us to live under non-stop video surveillance. But they bristle (to say the least) when their own misbehavior is recorded by people like us who are supposed to be taking the orders and liking it. Although they meet with uneven success (at least on the occasions when someone actually has the nerve and resources to fight it out in the judicial system), the reflexive impulse of functionaries everywhere is to criminalize any recording of their actions.  In one school system, students who recorded a teacher going ballistic and yanking a desk out from under a kid who refused to stand for the national anthem were suspended for ten days. In another, where students managed to capture a gym coach via cell phone camera stealing money out of lockers, the coach was eventually arrested. But the school administrators’ immeidate reaction was, not to apologize for the thieving coach, but to wring their hands over the violation of school policy involved in recording him.

Now consider that in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion school district, school adminstrators were able to remotely activate webcams built into laptops issued to students and spy on them; one student was actually disciplined for “inappropriate behavior in his home”!

In another illustration of the “one law for the lion and one for the lamb” principle, RateMyCop.com, a sort of Angie’s List for local police, attracts a lot of ire from police forces around the country. You know, the same people who’re always reassuring us that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear.”  It’s been met with particular hostility and even official investigation by prosecutors in some local jurisdictions, like Tempe, Arizona, because it’s supposedly a violation of the cops’ privacy rights — even though no addresses, phone numbers, or other identifying information besides name and serial number is listed. After all, you know how seriously the folks in Arizona take personal privacy issues, right?  Finally, a federal judge has ruled that RateMyCop is protected by the First Amendment, upholding a lawsuit by someone who was prosecuted in a Florida jurisdiction for posting comments to the site.

But while it’s an uphill battle to subject these alleged public servants to any kind of transparency, oddly enough it’s quite common for newspapers to print the names of people arrested by the local police. That’s arrested — not convicted of a crime.  Apparently the privacy and safety of an ordinary citizen count for nothing.

Final example: a video of a drug raid in Missouri (courtesy of Radley Balko), in which the SWAT team terrorized a family, fired their weapons repeatedly in front of their screaming children, and killed the family pets — all over possession of a small amount of marijuana. The parents were charged with — wait for it — endangering their children.

This sort of thing is nothing new. If the law were consistently enforced, for example, it would be impossible to carry out sting operations. After all, it’s illegal for an ordinary citizen to solicit illegal acts from another citizen. If the law applied to everyone equally, it would be illegal for a cop to attempt to buy drugs or solicit a prostitute. Interestingly, when the first professional police forces were created (Robert Peel’s eponymous “bobbies”), they were understood simply to be salaried functionaries exercising the same posse comitatus rights possessed by the ordinary citizen. Some vestigial remnant of the concept is preserved in the almost nonexistent practice of citizen’s arrest. But that was then. We’ve had 150 years of Prussianization since then.

P.J. Proudhon wrote “What is Property?” to demonstrate that, among other things, “property is impossible.” In other words, the statist version of property — artificial property rights — was rendered absurd and untenable by its own internal contradictions.

By the same token, we may say that statist legality is impossible. It cannot be consistently enforced without destroying itself.