Portside

Melina Abdullah, a BLM organizer and chair of Pan African Studies at California State University, L.A., says that local police are using arrests and felony charges to contain a resistance movement pushing to disarm, defund and abolish their departments. “I saw it happen several times; I was present for the targeting,” she says, recalling the way police officers watched and followed Richards over the last several years as they organized actions.

A new book shows how aggressive policing tactics exasperates structural racism and leads to more violence against marginalized communities.

No where do America’s wars come home more fiercely or embed themselves more deeply than in USA police forces. Jay Stanley and TomDispatch regular Matthew Harwood, both of the American Civil Liberties Union, write that intrusive new forms of technology, developed by or in conjunction with the Pentagon for battlefield use, are coming to your neighborhood. So welcome to the war zone, America.

Since 2005, according to an analysis by the Washington Post and Bowling Green State University, only 54 officers have been prosecuted nationwide, despite the thousands of fatal shootings by police.

With all the concern over the militarization of police in the past year, few noticed that the state of North Dakota became the first state in the country to allow police to equip drones with so-called “less than lethal” weapons such as rubber bullets, sound cannons, pepper spray, Tasers and tear gas. North Dakota House Bill 1328 wasn’t drafted that way, but then a law enforcement lobbyist with close ties to the drone industry got his hands on it.

What underlies most of these militarized forms of policing is a cynical politics of race that has perverted criminal justice policies; they are no longer about crime or justice, but instead the management of poor and non-white populations through ever-more-punitive practices. Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, describes how modern criminal justice policy was driven by a Republican effort to appeal to white voters in the South and then also by Democrats...