… is the plea of the one-time police informant who presides over the Support Your Local Police campaign. Federally subsidized transfer of battlefield-grade weapons and hardware to the “local” police is just fine, he contends, as long as no federal “strings” are attached. And cutting off access to that hardware would be a betrayal of the front-line soldiers in the war against Russian and Chinese-sponsored Communist subversion.
I am not making this up, nor am I reciting from a communique issued by the Pinochet Regime circa 1975, or El Salvador’s ARENA party ten years later.
“Our own government has been catering to certain minorities, sects, blocs, et cetera, and getting them agitated to the point of going out into the streets and promoting violence, creating violence … to the detriment of local authorities,” explains the SYLP chieftain. “Now that they’re starting to do this … we see the Obama administration, in an executive order, say they’re not going to send certain military equipment any longer to local police.”
That development would be greeted with resounding expressions of relief — if the objective of the SYLP campaign were to keep local police truly independent of federal control.
“Libertarians would see that as a victory,” he continues. “But the people on the streets will not.” Yes, the people in charge of SYLP have been critical of the transfer of military hardware to police “because of the strings attached…. It isn’t the equipment itself; it’s the strings that come with the equipment that we don’t like.”
“But nonetheless, if you put yourself in the shoes of a policeman today — what’s coming down the road, what’s happened recently, necessitates much of this equipment — whether you like it or not,” he continues.
What is “coming down the road,” he predicts, will be an onslaught of insurrectionist violence by Russian and Chinese-backed “separatist” groups and urban revolution orchestrated by the Communist Party, in addition to violence perpetrated by heavily-armed drug “cartels.”
With the “increasing militancy” of “cartels” and “Communist cadres in the inner city, whipping people up into the streets to do harm to the police, they need [military] equipment to protect themselves in the performance of their duties — whether we like it or not,” insists this temporally displaced refugee from a fifty-year-old right-wing agitprop film. “I mean, it doesn’t make much sense when we have a policeman with a billy club on the corner when a cartel guy down the street’s got an AK-47.”
Instances in which police are out-gunned are rare to the point of invisibility. In our current situation, the police are the marauders packing assault rifles, and dozens or scores of state-licensed home invasions are carried out by such people every damn day.
It wasn’t Russian or Chinese operatives who murdered Jose Guerena in the living room of his home, or slaughtered Aiyana Stanley after she was startled awake at midnight, or burned 19-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh in his crib. Those atrocities were not carried out by “Communist cadres in the inner cities.” The same is true of the routine highway robbery, by armed strangers, of innocent Americans who seek to travel anywhere in the United States, in the name of “asset forfeiture.”
“The portent of violence in our communities is all there for you to see if you just look around you,” concludes this apologist for police militarization, who is so fixated on “portents” of potential violence that he cannot see the pandemic of police violence that surrounds him right now.
6:39 pm on May 25, 2015
