TheBreakaway
Zy Marquiez
March 4, 2016
Allow me to preface this with a small preamble in stating that, am not of the mind that all officers do harm to people. Such is not the case.
However, there are many who proceed rather askance when interacting with police officers, and one cannot blame them. This is naturally because one can literally find countless videos [on all forms of media] of police personnel carrying out brutal attacks when there was no reason too. There are myriad times in which peaceful protesters are treated like absolute criminals only for exercising their rights of free speech. Ironic, because they say we live in the land of the free, and yet exercising that right often gets one in more trouble than speeding, or many other infractions.
Moving forward, the militarization of police departments has been taking place for quite some time. For far more than a decade, this disturbing trend has been increasing with no end in sight. Now, some police departments wish to weaponise drones.
Ironically, the militarization of the police state began ostensibly because the “war on terror”. So, are we to believe that this next installment will follow the same parameters?
More often than it should, innocent people are hurt within these raids. An example of this follow was penned by Alex Kane a while back, in a piece named ’11 Shocking Facts About America’s Militarized Police Forces’:
” The likelihood of people being killed is raised by the practice of SWAT teams busting down doors with no warning, which leads some people to think it may be a burglary, who could in turn try to defend themselves. The ACLU documented seven cases of civilians dying, and 46 people being injured. That’s only in the cases the civil liberties group looked at, so the number is actually higher.
Take the case of Tarika Wilson, which the ACLU summarizes. The 26-year-old biracial mother lived in Lima, Ohio. Her boyfriend, Anthony Terry, was wanted by the police on suspicion of drug dealing. So on January 4, 2008, a SWAT team busted down Wilson’s door and opened fire. A SWAT officer killed Wilson and injured her one-year-old baby, Sincere Wilson.”[1]
Other examples of children being injured include:
” In May, after their Wisconsin home had burned down, the Phonesavanh family was staying with relatives in Georgia. One night, a SWAT team with assault rifles invaded the home and threw a flashbang grenade–despite the presence of kids’ toys in the front yard. The police were looking for the father’s nephew on drug charges. He wasn’t there. But a 19-month-old named Bou Bou was–and the grenade landed in his crib.
Bou Bou was wounded in the chest and had third-degree burns. He was put in a medically induced coma.
Another high-profile instance of a child being killed by paramilitary police tactics occurred in 2010, when seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was killed in Detroit. The city’s Special Response Team (Detroit’s SWAT) was looking for Chauncey Owens, a suspect in the killing of a teenager who lived on the second floor of the apartment Jones lived in.
Officers raided the home, threw a flash-bang grenade, and fired one shot that struck Jones in the head.”[2]
That’s just a handful of the examples available that detail what overwhelming force can accomplish. One thing is using overwhelming force for a group of criminals, but as one can note, in these cases entire teams were used to attempt to apprehend individuals, with the iron fist slamming down on innocents in the process, in these examples being children.
Am not saying all police officers are like this. However, we must outline what is and has taken place in order to see where things will go in the future if the weaponisation of drones is allowed to take place.
Also keep in mind, the countless examples of children, playing around with things that look like guns, and end up being shot by officers. Or how about the people that only have phones in their hands? Some might say, “Well the officer didn’t know they had such and such.” Excellent point. To that, one must rebut, how about when people have a mere broomstick [yes you read that right, a broomstick] and still end up shot in the process. Worse, there’s videos that can be see of people holding no weapons at all and getting shot. How about them apples bullets?
We can extrapolate from there, that if police officers are already having a hard time figuring out which people[allegedly] has weapons, and who doesn’t, and often proceed with an iron fist, where do you think the militarization of police departments will go if they are allowed to remove the human element from the battlefield American streets? Will the people manning the cameras via drones be able to see with clarity what children potential suspects are doing, and not confusing phones, broomsticks, or worse, air, with deadly weapons? Is the lack of accountability going to continue when innocents get hurt [because its highly likely that that will take place if drones are weaponize], or get worse since people won’t be able to identify who piloted the drone? Ruminate about that for a bit.
It might sound silly asking, but the fact that its happened countless times already, should be alarming. And even if it hadn’t, that would be no precedent for blindly allowing for further militarization of police officers that are barely held accountable.
This is one subject that needs to rise to the forefront, because it will be a topic that will be increasingly pertinent in the coming years/decades. In fact, it’s already here knocking on the door. Heck, laws have been passed already in certain states with people barely batting an eyelash.
The video below, by James Corbett and his guest give this topic a cursory look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6kVm1d3i6I
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Sources & References
[1] http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/11-shocking-facts-about-americas-militarized-police-forces
[2] Ibid
[3] Video Source: Corbett Report
