Cops and Black People: Security and "the Enemy"

Security politics have been a major component of America's political history (for particularly potent or cynical examples, see: the Mexican American War, Japanese-American internment camps, HUAC, or pretty much everything the CIA does). In the modern era, our relationship to securitization has been defined by 9/11 and its aftermath.  Many have posed the question of whether our attempts to mortgage our freedom for physical security have actually been effective - considering the whack-a-mole character of the War on Terror, I am personally persuaded that trading in Al Qaeda for an accumulation of global terrorist networks (which still includes Al Qaeda, by the way) isn't really an upgrade.  But then again, I can't tell you anything about the operational capacity of any of these networks or how they compare to their state 15 years ago, nor have I done any statistical research about the frequency of terrorist plots against US citizens or interests.

There are a few things I can say with confidence, however.  One of them is that literally millions of civilians have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan because of our security fetish, and millions more have been the victims of terrible non-lethal tragedies.

Another is that in a world of free flowing information, controlling the flow of people and materiel by limiting our physical freedom is totally futile.  Two cases in point - the Fort Hood shooter and the gunmen and the beyond tasteless Muhammed cartooning event were either inspired or guided by the ideas of radical Islamists that they gained via digital communication. Building walls and bombing people isn't going to stop terrorism motivated by radical interpretations of Islam, because radical Islam is an ideological identification. Killing people and abandoning our own core values is a double victory for those the United States government is trying to defeat; we provide further motivation for people to hate us while at the same time altering the elements of our society that we've fought hardest to protect.

The terrible fallacy of security politics plays itself out in all aspects of life, not just foreign affairs.  Examining police violence against blacks through the lens of securitization provides some illuminating insights.  Many black people perceive the police as their enemy, which leads them to act in a way that may reinforce the prejudiced beliefs of officers (Freddie Gray ran from officers for no apparent reason, for example). Conversely, police, who spend much of their time "looking for bad guys" and psychologically conditioning themselves to act towards others will aggression and suspicion are likely to interpret innocuous actions as criminal.

This could play two different ways in the long term. On the one hand, police could continue to militarize and bank on keeping the peace by reinforcing their superiority of force and monopoly of legally sanctioned violence - the controversies around military-grade armaments being distributed to some police jurisdictions suggests that many cops may prefer this route.  On the other hand, police could work to re-establish themselves as members and allies of the constituencies they police - the calls for "community policing" tactics give me some hope that we can figure out a non-Orwellian way forward.

For the cops out there, it's not good enough to blame the communities you police for not getting it- people feel they way they do about cops for good reasons based on their lives and collective experiences.  If you have ever wondered why some people think you're the enemy, and you're sincerely interested in finding an answer to that question, then move beyond dismissing the cop-bashers as thugs and criminals, and start to think about what their life experiences might have been.