The neighbourhood was burning hot, angry and crazy: “Everyone was hanging out of their windows,” Marquette Frye would later recall, “No one had air conditioning. Everyone had attitude”. Twenty-one years old, the Los Angeles resident was out on the streets, celebrating the end of his two-year parole for robbery. Together with his brother Ronnie, Fyre had a few cold beers and then cruised the streets in their mother’s 10-year-old Buick. Then, as Fyre drunkenly weaved his way down Avalon Boulevard, he saw the red, flashing lights of a police car behind him.
Fyre played the clown as he went through an impromptu sobriety test—“shucking and jiving” for his friends on the streets, the arresting officer recorded. Then, there was pushing and shoving; the police hit Fyre with a baton, and one officer a shotgun. Fyre’s mother, Rena, tried to intervene and was handcuffed.
As the police drove away with the young man, amid a shower of bottles, White drivers began to be stopped and beaten. The barbershop across the road, and the liquor store, were looted and then went up in flames.
An American nightmare
Last week, the world watched aghast as police armed with tasers, tear-gas masks—and in one case backed up by snipers—arrested hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters at universities across the United States. The economic historian Caroline Fohlin was violently attacked by police after she tried to protect a student, and was then charged with assault. The eminent philosopher Noelle McAfee, the author of a well-regarded book that considers the social and political consequences of the unhealed trauma of 9/11 on American public life, also ended up in prison.
The display of armed force—which took place even though authorities said the protests were peaceful, and the demonstrators did not resist arrest— has provided disturbing evidence of what happens when police forces become militarised, treating legitimate protests like insurgencies.
Ever since the rebellion sparked off by Fyre’s arrest in 1965, police forces across America have increasingly modelled themselves on the army—with some, law scholar Anta Plowden records, even acquiring equipment like mine-resistant trucks and armoured assault vehicles to protect quiet suburban streets. According to Plowden, from 1997-2020, police forces received some $5.1 billion in military material from the Department of Defence.
The images of armoured personnel carriers confronting demonstrators at Ferguson, where violence broke out in 2014 after the killing of Black youth Michael Brown, led President Barack Obama to end the transfers—but President Donald Trump resumed the programme.
For many Americans, the police’s treatment of students and academics likely seemed extraordinarily gentle. Figures studied by The Washington Post show that more than 1,000 people are killed by police annually—numbers five times higher than in conflict-torn India, with three times America’s population and 15 times higher than European countries, in population-adjusted terms.
Although half of the people shot and killed by police are White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. There is no evident relationship, the statistician Cody Ross has shown, between crime rates and the use of lethal force by police.
The militarisation of police, the work of economist Frederico Masera shows, hasn’t made police officers safer. While violent crime rates have been falling for years, they continue to rise in some urban centres like Memphis, Dallas and Washington DC, especially in low-income areas.
Following the violence in Watts, a young Back resident contrasted his life with the conditions in affluent central and western Los Angeles: “You’ve conquered it, baby. You’ve got it made. Some nights on the roof of our rotten, falling down buildings we can actually see your lights shining in the distance. So near and yet so far. We want to reach out and grab it and punch it on the nose.”
American policing has focused on hitting back—but not at addressing the issue.
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America’s counter-insurgency
Like in many new nations, journalist Radley Balko has written, American policing in 18th and 19th-century America was an informal affair: Local sheriffs and volunteer militia enforced order when it was needed, fought Native Americans, and hunted down runaway slaves. From the mid-1800s, though, police forces began to form in the great industrial cities of the Northeast. These forces went to some lengths to distinguish themselves from the conventional military, and their duties stretched to community work, like running soup kitchens.
Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, the military often found itself engaged in brutally restoring order after violent racial conflict. The so-called race riot—almost always involving White mobs that attacked and killed Blacks—became a recurrent feature of American life after the war of 1914-1918, historian Edgar Schuler has noted.
Large-scale military deployments were also used to crush working-class protests that broke out during the Great Depression. Major George Patton—who would later acquire global fame leading the fight against Nazi Germany—was charged with dispersing tens of thousands of marchers seeking bonuses for their military service in the First World War.
Even though Patton succeeded in dispersing the marchers without using bullets, he later gave this advice to trainee officers: “If it is necessary to use machine guns, aim at their feet. If you must fire, DO A GOOD JOB. A few casualties become martyrs; a large number becomes an object lesson.”
Following the violence in Watts, which left 34 people dead and over 1,000 injured, over 14,000 troops had to be called in to restore order. According to Balko, the Los Angeles police’s point man for the riots, Inspector Daryl Gates, observed that “rather than a single mob, we had people attacking from all directions”. We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails,” he added, “Guns were pointed out of second-story windows, [and] random shots fired.”
To Gates, who later became chief of police in the city, it seemed like guerrilla war—and he turned to the United States Army, then fighting insurgents in Vietnam, for lessons. The heavily armed Special Weapons And Tactics unit, the high-velocity rifle, and the grenade launcher became part of the repertoire of American policing.
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Fighting the community
Even though the first SWAT operation—a 1969 raid against the Black Panthers, which saw its activists and police trade 5,000 rounds in three hours in a crowded neighbourhood, miraculously only injuring six people—was botched, the idea of policing as a kind of counter-insurgency entrenched itself, Balko recounts. The murderous rampage of Charles Whitman at the University of Texas in Austin, which claimed 14 lives (including himself) in 1966, added to the case for stronger police weaponry. The war on drugs, which began in 1971, extended the acquisition of military tactics to forces across the country.
The passage of the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act in 1981, notes Plowden, saw the military and police forces conduct joint paramilitary operations, using U2 spyplanes to search for marijuana farms, before launching raids using tactics designed for the killing fields of Vietnam. The strategy was profoundly counterproductive, as criminals responded by expanding their arsenals, and acquiring increasingly lethal weaponry.
Like soldiers, Plowden argues, police came to see the communities they served as battlefields, where “everyone is a suspect and just about anyone can kill you within a moment’s notice”. From the murderous siege of a cult in Waco, Texas, to children and bystanders being killed in counter-narcotics raids, the impact of this new doctrine manifested itself through the coming decades.
“The sociologist Julian Go has suggested that American police forces began treating troubled inner-city areas like “internal colonies,” “metropolitan spaces with large or rising numbers of minorities who are racialised as inferior, denied equal treatment, and appear to pose threats to the dominant order”.
As Plowden has noted, “There should be no reason that American police kill more civilians in one month than an entire country, the United Kingdom, has done in 100 years”. The result has been a country fractured in its attitudes to the police: A White America.
For India, the lessons are important. Ever since 26/11, Indian police forces have also become increasingly enmeshed with military roles, a phenomenon until then only seen in insurgency-torn regions of Punjab and Kashmir. Though there can be no serious debate that police can and must be equipped to engage in such special missions, Brigadier MS Khara (retired) has argued, the expanding counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism missions have degraded the ability of police to carry out their normal functions, within a structured legal framework.
Like in America, that has meant the police has become increasingly alienated from communities—ultimately corroding the entire criminal justice system and the legitimacy of the nation-state itself.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
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