Would Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic marches to end segregation and grant voting rights to Black Americans have happened at all if Bull Connor’s police owned the same military equipment that the Ferguson Police Department has today? Can peacefully exercising First Amendment rights create any lasting change if police have the weaponry – and, apparently, the legal authority – to immediately and violently disperse crowds?
Bull Connor became legendary as the Birmingham public safety commissioner who ordered police dogs and fire hoses to be used on peaceful civil rights protesters in 1960s Alabama. Birmingham became known as “Bombingham” after multiple racially-motivated bombingsaimed at intimidating the city’s black residents rocked the city, from the North Smithfield neighborhood to the notorious 6th Avenue Baptist Church bombing.
In response, Dr. King declared “Project C (Confrontation)” on the Birmingham police, both to expose Connor’s heavy-handed law enforcement approach and to fill the jails with civil rights protesters willing to throw themselves at the grinding machine of the nation’s most racist police department.
Connor was eventually forced out of his position, and the civil rights movement succeeded at ending public segregation and securing voting rights. But the 1960s was a very different environment for both protesters and police. The first SWAT team wasn’t formed until 1966 in Los Angeles, and the first SWAT raid didn’t take place until 1969, when L.A. County law enforcement engaged in an hours-long shootout at the Los Angeles headquarters of the Black Panther Party.
Once Richard Nixon legalized no-knock raids for all local law enforcement agencies as part of an omnibus drug bill, and Ronald Reagan launched the War on Drugs, police departments became largely unaccountable paramilitary forces.
The War on Drugs led to the signing of the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Agencies Act, in which the military trained and joined forces with local police to stop the flow of drugs into the country. Next, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 allowed for any local police department cooperating with federal agencies to take a cut of seized assets in drug raids.
Then, in 1988, the floodgates opened with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which enabled police departments that proved successful at drug raids to become eligible for billions of dollars in federal government grants to procure new weapons and equipment. Nearly a decade later, theNational Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997 established the Law Enforcement Support Program, streamlining the process for local police departments to receive over $4.3 billion in military equipment since the bill’s passage.
Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has allowed even more sophisticated military equipment to find its way to our local police departments. Last Sunday’s New York Times featured a front-page graphic illustrating some of the equipment that small-town police departments have been able to procure. Richland County in South Carolina, for example, has an M113 armored personnel carrier.
Stephens County, Okla., has a Bell UH-1 Huey helicopter, while Benton County in Arkansas has a mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle. Police in Collier County, Fla., possess M-16 rifles, and St. Louis County, Mo.,, which includes Ferguson, has received a dozen 5.56mm rifles, night-vision goggles and .45-caliber pistols in recent years. In just one decade, the number of no-knock SWAT team raids increased astronomically: from 30,000 in 1995 to 50,000 in 2005. Hard as it is to believe, SWAT teams currently raid 137 American homes every day.
If MLK and other civil rights protesters who put themselves in the direct path of police attempted to try something similar today, would they have been able to march to Selma? Or would a phalanx of heavily-armed Alabama state troopers equipped with automatic weapons and tanks have used their tactical superiority to stop the march in the first half-hour?
Bull Connor’s fire hoses and dogs are child’s play compared to the tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades the Ferguson Police Department has used on protesters in the last week. People armed with nothing but phones have no chance marching down a street blocked off by police in armored personnel carriers wearing night-vision goggles strapped with assault rifles filled with magazines of NATO rounds at the ready.
If the First Amendment is to have any merit, the people must be able to exercise their rights to free speech, free assembly and free press in any public space at any time of the day, without interference from the state. The lasting change won by the actions of movement leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers couldn’t have happened without protesters who were willing to subject themselves to batons, fire hoses, police dogs and handcuffs. But what must today’s protesters be willing to endure to gain lasting social change? Tear gas? Explosions? LRAD sound cannons? Rubber bullets? Assault weapons?
Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia is introducing a bill when Congress reconvenes in September that will stop the transfer of military weaponry to police departments. Michigan senator Carl Levin, chair of the Armed Services Committee and author of National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) spending bills, has said he plans to revisit section 1033 of the NDAA dealing with military weapons transfers to police, to see if the program should be amended.
The American people must demand action from our members of Congress and make the demilitarization of police a central election-year issue for local, state and federal candidates if we want to keep our First Amendment rights intact. The future of our democracy depends on it.