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| If you got it, flaunt it. Concussion grenades, rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, snow plows, horses and dump trucks...Republican National Convention, St. Paul, August 2008. |
John Hanrahan
Last March, when some 500 activists arrived at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in northern Virginia to protest the abusive treatment that Pfc. Bradley Manning, the accused leaker of secret government documents to the Wikileaks website, was being subjected to while incarcerated there, they were confronted by a heavily-armed, riot-geared phalanx of dozens of state and local police, many of them on horseback for added measure.
I was there and wondered what in the world was going on.
These police in their black Darth Vader-like gear weren’t exactly facing a gun-wielding horde, or guerrillas with grenade launchers or a mob threatening to storm the base. Instead, they were confronting unarmed, nonviolent protesters who included older military veterans, recent Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, government workers, the ever-active antiwar women (and men) of Code Pink, members of various anti-war and anti-torture groups, lawyer observers and a smattering of reporters mainly from alternative media. Did the police think this assembly was going to charge into a heavily-fortified military base, overpower well-armed and well-trained Marines, and spring Manning from solitary confinement?
Since then I found out police often dress like Darth Vader at protest rallies. It’s a tactic to discourage dissent, with battlefield equipment supplied by the Pentagon and other equipment paid for in part with Homeland Security funds.
Increasingly around the country, noted civil liberties attorney Bill Quigley told Nieman Watchdog this summer, "What we have had is a militarization of the police response to nonviolent demonstrations. You attend one of those rallies and you could get the impression that it's unpatriotic to protest, that you're doing something wrong, that you're some sort of security threat."
Compared to the Vietnam war era, Quigley said, police around the country use more intimidating tactics these days, which likely discourages or scares off some people who might otherwise want to participate in protests. During the Vietnam war, he said, there was "pushback" – often violent – by police at demonstrations, but the police then were not decked out in full-blown military regalia and carrying the often heavy weaponry that can be the case today.
The militarization of the nation’s police forces is one of the most under-reported stories in the mainstream U.S. press. The issue sometimes surfaces in connection with SWAT teams conducting drug raids, particularly when police or Drug Enforcement Administration agents bust down the wrong door and frighten innocent occupants half to death and even injure them and destroy property. But rarely are there news stories questioning the propriety of these police forces becoming, in effect, little domestic armies. And the increase in anti-terrorism fear-mongering to justify the use of heavily-armed, riot-geared police at political demonstrations has the added dimension of providing a chilling effect on people’s exercise of their First Amendment rights to peaceably assemble and to petition their government.
It’s time reporters on all news organizations begin going to their local and state police departments and asking: How much of this crap do you have, and why do you need it?
Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and director of the law clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans, has served as counsel to a number of public interest organizations on civil liberties, constitutional rights and civil disobedience issues. In that capacity and until recently as the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, he frequently monitors demonstrations. Quigley said that around the country, protests, both small and large, are often overseen by a "heavy-duty police presence," replete with "those Ninja-Turtle-type outfits, special batons, shields, kneepads, surveillance cameras," etc. Police are sometimes on horseback (as they were at Quantico), astride "animals that are specially trained for crowd control" and that can be especially daunting to older and disabled people who aren't so nimble on their feet. Police also often try to orchestrate the protests, imposing new rules as they go along (as was the case at Quantico) – and, in some cases, using sound trucks to issue orders to control marchers.
While monitoring protests in various communities, Quigley said he has often asked state and local police why they turn out in their military gear for protests involving several hundred people engaging in a peaceful march or rally. Speaking as if from the same playbook, the answer they always give, Quigley said, is that it's not the peaceful demonstrators they are worried about but the fear that militants bent on violence will infiltrate and turn a peaceable demonstration into street fighting and property destruction.
To Quigley and others who have attended protests, this is pure bunkum.
"When they come dressed like that, they are not there to protect and defend our constitutional rights to peaceably assemble," Quigley said. "They are there to intimidate. Every demonstration is like a practice-run for state and local police to try out their new equipment and devices. They're all getting the federal anti-terrorist money, so if you go to a peaceful protest in Georgia, or Pittsburgh or New York or other places, you'll likely see the police using that as a pretext for a military-like response."
Overall, Quigley said, since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon "it is absolutely true that people's ability to protest, as well as the response of the government to those protests, is different than it was before. It's tougher to organize and hold a protest" these days with police and city officials setting harsh terms for demonstrations – in effect, creating penned-in “free-speech zones,” arbitrary boundaries within which protesters must stay or face arrest. The police desire for crowd control and security takes precedence over the Constitution.
At Quantico, even after the police had closed the roads off to traffic for miles, they still ordered marchers to stay on the side of the road and not go into the street. When a designated contingent of six protesters, including Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, asked to be allowed as a sign of respect to put flowers on a replica of the Iwo Jima Memorial outside the base on federal property, the police at first agreed and then reneged. They told Ellsberg and the others that Quantico officials wouldn’t allow them to go right up to the World War II memorial – which is normally open to the public – but they could stand behind the police barrier 10 feet or more away and throw the flowers at the memorial. For absolute arbitrariness and callousness, the police and military orchestration of what was meant to be a solemn moment at a monument that honors Marines who died in battle is hard to top. Did they think the protesters were going to deface the memorial? That the 80-year-old Ellsberg was going to make a dash onto the base? The sheer authoritarianism embodied in this situation is symptomatic of the tragic diminishment of civil liberties since 9/11, when homeland security and the be-afraid, be-very-afraid syndrome took over.
Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears – in a well-done story that was a rare instance of that newspaper actually covering a protest by progressive activists – quoted former Army colonel and State Department official Ann Wright as saying: “They wouldn't even let us get up to the memorial...It was disrespectful.”
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