Illustration by Egan Jimenez, Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
The United States continues to grow the police state to serve as a bulwark of counterinsurgency.
Since the mid-1960s, the militarization of U.S. police, counter-insurgency, and the surveillance capacity of the civilian law enforcement establishment, then relatively new, has today reached extraordinary levels of sophistication and questionable degrees of constitutionality.
The accelerated militarization of America’s police agencies began exponentially to explode during the later years of the Vietnam War, as widespread student anti-war protests of the late sixties reached their zenith. During the same period, the Civil Rights mass movement of Black people for social and political equality in the South began to be co-opted with symbolic government electoral concessions like the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Urban militancy, cries of “Black Power”, and “Power to the People” reverberated in the Northern, Eastern, and West Coast domestic colonial enclaves, today euphemistically called the “hood” striking alarm in America’s white political establishment.
But even as campuses erupted in student protests, and cities burned from Black rage, the U.S. government, FBI, CIA, and military intelligence units, had revitalized their covert Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) tricks initially deployed during the fifties to disrupt and infiltrate the old white left at the height of the Cold War, and redeployed it to disrupt, neutralize or otherwise destroy Black organizations and the “new left”.
By 1970 fully 70% of the FBI COINTELPRO operations were aimed at Black organizations, from the non-violent SCLC led by Dr. King to SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panther Party (BPP). Ultimately, the majority of the 70% of COINTELPRO operations that focused on Black groups and Black leaders collectively were directed exclusively at the BPP. Why was this?
In the early morning of December 8, 1969, just four days after Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party was murdered in a drug induced coma administered by an FBI/police snitch in Chicago, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) attacked the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party’s Office, and the acronym SWAT, Special Weapons And Tactics, first came into the public lexicon. The police deployment of military like tactics against a Black organization openly dedicated to the self-defense of the Black community was intended to send a message to Black America. The message was violently simple: resistance to the Police occupation of the Black Community, to racist Police violence, and opposition to the monopoly of violence by the State could not and would not be tolerated or allowed to exist.
However, unlike the Chicago Panther residence, SWAT’s initial attack met with unanticipated consequences. The Los Angeles Panther Office was fortified and the initial SWAT assault was repulsed, with no Panther casualties and a day-long siege ensued, highlighted by the police dropping explosives on the roof of the office – with no effect. Ultimately the Panthers achieved their goal – negotiated surrender, in broad daylight, before the entire Black community and on national television. Organized Black self-defense from police terror was vindicated.
Despite the limited victory of the Los Angeles Panthers, they survived), the concept of military style police assaults would be politically justified, first during Nixon’s “war on drugs”, then in Reagan and Clinton’s “war on crime”, and ultimately evolving into that immaculate rationale, Bush’s “war on terror”. Each politically expedient self declared “war” would require more and better military hardware, and innovative police training first taken straight from the battlefields of Vietnam, and the racist colonial Zionist occupation of Palestine. By the late Seventies most police agencies, large or small, had to have a SWAT team. Millions of dollars were provided by the Federal government to provide for training police officers in urban military style tactics, providing facilities for police civilian riot control, and mass arrests, techniques for isolating entire communities as designated areas of “criminal activities”. SWAT teams are now employed routinely for any number of mundane police arrests. An overwhelming percentage of “no-knock” invasions of people's homes by heavily armed police officers (SWAT teams) who tended to shoot first and ask questions later has led to hundreds of people mistakenly or inadvertently killed.
Building the Police State
As of February 17, 2024, there were over 69 sites under construction or opening, renovation, or expansion of facilities for “Public Safety”, SWAT Team police training, mostly near predominantly Black communities. These facilities, or fledgling “Cop Cities” will train militarized police units (SWAT) Bomb and Explosive Units in the finer arts of counter urban guerilla warfare, along with U.S. partners like the Israeli National Police. These Cop Cities will hone the skills of close quarter sniper techniques to eliminate “identified high value targets”, Search and Capture (arrest) Operations in densely populated environments, as well as Population Control.
Black Activists and journalists In mid-October, 2023, conducted a search by state, alphabetically to identify police training sites for SWAT team urban tactics. At that time, 47 cities/counties were found, with documents (meeting minutes, construction/architecture firms, news articles, and/or press releases) confirming the existence of such projects. Tens of millions of dollars were being allocated for the development and maintenance of these militarized Police Training facilities. Major manufacturers of weapons, and heavy duty armored vehicles have secured tens of millions of dollars of government, state, and local contracts to arm SWAT teams and maintain and support militarized police.
The confirmed range for the size of these “Cop City” projects is as low as a 3,500 square foot structure on 3 acres to a 366,000 square foot village on 146 acres. The largest being planned did not include details on the actual facility, but the proposed site is a whopping 800 acres. Historically, a basic prerequisite for autocratic Fascist rule is a national militarized police force, backed by an all-pervasive civilian police intelligence apparatus with a singular national Database. It hasn’t been a long time coming but corporate America and its political power structure have fashioned a police state under cover of a spurious “electoral college” democracy and chauvinistic white nationalism. It’s called Democratic Fascism.
Dhoruba Bin-Wahad is a former Black Panther Party Leader from Harlem, NY. He was also a Black Liberation Army (BLA) member. He spent 19 years in prison as a Political Prisoner. And was a designated COINTELPRO target, on the FBI Agitator Index. While in Prison Bin Wahad was an FBI/NY Correctional PRISACT target until his conviction was overturned in 1990. He is an activist Pan-African and currently resides in West Africa.
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