\nNorm Stanager wrote for YES! Magazine (via AlterNet) 17 November 2011,\n\nPolice Chief Who Oversaw 1999 WTO Crackdown Says Paramilitary Policing Is a Disaster<\/a>\n \n“We have to clear the intersection,” said the field commander. “We\nhave to clear the intersection,” the operations commander agreed,\nfrom his bunker in the Public Safety Building. Standing alone on the\nedge of the crowd, I, the chief of police, said to myself, “We have\nto clear the intersection.”\n \nWhy?\n \nBecause of all the what-ifs. What if a fire breaks out in the Sheraton\nacross the street? What if a woman goes into labor on the seventeenth\nfloor of the hotel? What if a heart patient goes into cardiac arrest in\nthe high-rise on the corner? What if there’s a stabbing, a shooting,\na serious-injury traffic accident? How would an aid car, fire engine or\npolice cruiser get through that sea of people? The cop in me supported\nthe decision to clear the intersection. But the chief in me should have\nvetoed it. And he certainly should have forbidden the indiscriminate\nuse of tear gas to accomplish it, no matter how many warnings we barked\nthrough the bullhorn.\n \nMy support for a militaristic solution caused all hell to break\nloose. Rocks, bottles and newspaper racks went flying. Windows were\nsmashed, stores were looted, fires lighted; and more gas filled the\nstreets, with some cops clearly overreacting, escalating and prolonging\nthe conflict. The “Battle in Seattle,” as the WTO protests and their\naftermath came to be known, was a huge setback—for the protesters,\nmy cops, the community.\n<\/blockquote>\nDid anybody consider informing the protesters of the issues and asking\nfor cooperation,\nor checking to see if there were alternate routes for emergency vehicles,\nor….\nHey, I’m not a professional emergency responder, but surely there\nmust be a plan B in case some major intersection is out of commission\ndue to a water main blowout, natural gas leak, earthquake, or whatever.\n \nThis article was published a few days before the UC Davis pepper spray events,\nbut the author explicitly cites what happened to Scott Olsen in Oakland\nand the arrests in Atlanta, saying those are continuations of the same\nproblems he experience in Seattle in 1999.\n \nThen he gets into why:\n\n\n \nMuch of the problem is rooted in a rigid command-and-control hierarchy\nbased on the military model. American police forces are beholden to\narchaic internal systems of authority whose rules emphasize bureaucratic\nregulations over conduct on the streets. An officer’s hair length,\nthe shine on his shoes and the condition of his car are more important\nthan whether he treats a burglary victim or a sex worker with dignity\nand respect. In the interest of “discipline,” too many police bosses\ntreat their frontline officers as dependent children, which helps explain\nwhy many of them behave more like juvenile delinquents than mature,\ncompetent professionals. It also helps to explain why persistent,\npatterned misconduct, including racism, sexism, homophobia, brutality,\nperjury and corruption, do not go away, no matter how many blue-ribbon\npanels are commissioned or how much training is provided.\n \nExternal political factors are also to blame, such as the continuing\nmadness of the drug war. Last year police arrested 1.6 million\nnonviolent drug offenders. In New York City alone almost 50,000 people\n(overwhelmingly black, Latino or poor) were busted for possession of\nsmall amounts of marijuana—some of it, we have recently learned,\nplanted by narcotics officers. The counterproductive response to 9\/11,\nin which the federal government began providing military equipment and\ntraining even to some of the smallest rural departments, has fueled the\nmilitarization of police forces. Everyday policing is characterized by\na SWAT mentality, every other 911 call a military mission. What emerges\nis a picture of a vital public-safety institution perpetually at war\nwith its own people. The tragic results—raids gone bad, wrong houses\nhit, innocent people and family pets shot and killed by police—are\nchronicled in Radley Balko’s excellent 2006 reportOverkill: The Rise\nof Paramilitary Police Raids in America.\n<\/blockquote>\nHe notes that the police are also the 99%, even though they’re being\nused by the 1%.\n \nThen he says there is a solution to police militarization:\n \nAssuming the necessity of radical structural reform, how do we proceed? By\nbuilding a progressive police organization, created by rank-and-file\nofficers, “civilian” employees and community representatives. Such\nan effort would include plans to flatten hierarchies; create a true\ncitizen review board with investigative and subpoena powers; and ensure\ncommunity participation in all operations, including policy-making,\nprogram development, priority-setting and crisis management. In short,\ncops and citizens would forge an authentic partnership in policing\nthe city. And because partners do not act unilaterally, they would be\ncompelled to keep each other informed, and to build trust and mutual\nrespect—qualities sorely missing from the current equation.\n<\/blockquote>\nHe then voices the 1%’s worst fear.\nWhat if their Praetorian Guard goes over to the plebeians?\n \nAll that and let’s get on with dealing the underlying causes, as well.\nAs everyone from\n\nGrover Norquist<\/a>\nto\n\nJimmy Carter<\/a> to all the living\nex-presidents of Mexico have said (and even\n\nthe current Mexican president is hinting<\/a>):\n\nit’s time to end the War on Drugs.<\/a>\n \n\n \n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Occupy UC Davis and the UC Davis Police have suddenly turned militarization of police from an obscure topic to a huge story with more than 3,000 stories found by google news. But what’s the connection between Mic check stops a police riot at UC Davis and CCA charges inmates five days’ pay for one telephone […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,1113,48,40,14,15,2,19,72,20,21,22,178],"tags":[339,8817,8717,3384,3388,1293,8701,3383,8730,981,7,1299,3299,8870,3387,3385,3390,1270,3389,1297,1466,8731,383,3371,3372,6,8749,82],"class_list":["post-1257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-cca","category-code-enforcement","category-community","category-economy","category-education","category-government","category-history","category-incarceration","category-law","category-planning","category-politics","category-vlcia","tag-california","tag-cca","tag-community","tag-davis","tag-democracy","tag-felipe-calderon","tag-georgia","tag-grover-norquist","tag-incarceration","tag-jimmy-carter","tag-lowndes-county","tag-militarization","tag-occupy","tag-occupy-atlanta","tag-occupy-oakland","tag-occupy-uc-davis","tag-plebeians","tag-police","tag-praetorian-guard","tag-private-prison","tag-profiteering","tag-safety","tag-taxes","tag-uc-davis","tag-university-of-california","tag-valdosta","tag-vlcia","tag-war-on-drugs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-kh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\n
<\/a>\nThen came day two. Early in the morning, large contingents of\ndemonstrators began to converge at a key downtown intersection. They sat\ndown and refused to budge. Their numbers grew. A labor march would soon\nadd additional thousands to the mix.\n
\nThe paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a\nblack-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect\nthe brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies\ninevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and\npeople of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive,\nmilitaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day,\nin neighborhoods across the country.\n
\nThere will always be situations—an armed and barricaded suspect, a man\nwith a knife to his wife’s throat, a school-shooting rampage—that\nrequire disciplined, military-like operations. But most of what police\nare called upon to do, day in and day out, requires patience, diplomacy\nand interpersonal skills. I’m convinced it is possible to create a\nsmart organizational alternative to the paramilitary bureaucracy that\nis American policing. But that will not happen unless, even as we cull\n“bad apples” from our police forces, we recognize that the barrel\nitself is rotten.\n
\n\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.occupypolice.org\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/ray.jpg\")
<\/a>\nBut imagine the community and its cops united in the effort\nto responsibly “police” the Occupy movement. Picture thousands\nof people gathered to press grievances against their government and\nthe corporations, under the watchful, sympathetic protection of their\npartners in blue.\n<\/blockquote>\nImagine Ray Lewis, retired Philadelphia police captain arrested at\nOccupy Wall Street a few days ago.\nImagine thousands of Ray Lewises….\n![](\"http:\/\/change-production.s3.amazonaws.com\/photos\/8\/oe\/vb\/YwOevBBwDsdQUBT-236x236-cropped.jpg\")
<\/a>\nAnd even before that, there’s something we can do right here in\nLowndes County, Georgia.\nStop the private prison profiteering at public taxpayer expense.\n\nWe don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.<\/a>\nSpend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.\n