External resources relating to Racism and citizenship
Since the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police in Missouri last weekend, the people of Ferguson have been subjected to a military-style crackdown by a squadron of local police departments dressed like combat soldiers. This has prompted residents to liken the conditions on the ground in Ferguson to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine.
And who can blame them?
The dystopian scenes of paramilitary units in camouflage rampaging through the streets of Ferguson, pointing assault rifles at unarmed residents and launching tear gas into people’s front yards from behind armored personnel carriers (APCs), could easily be mistaken for a Tuesday afternoon in the occupied West Bank.
And it’s no coincidence.
FERGUSON, Mo. — For four nights in a row, they streamed onto West Florissant Avenue wearing camouflage, black helmets and vests with '
stamped on the back. They carried objects that doubled as warnings: assault rifles and ammunition, slender black nightsticks and gas masks.
They were not just one police force but many, hailing from communities throughout north
Their adversaries were a ragtag group of mostly unarmed neighborhood residents, hundreds of African-Americans whose pent-up fury at the police had sent them pouring onto streets and sidewalks in Ferguson, demanding justice for
A protracted territorial struggle has been waged in recent years in many parts of the West Bank between settlers seeking to expand the areas under their control and annexing as much land as possible and Palestinian landowners interested in farming their land. The civilian security coordinators (CSCs) and the civilian guarding squads that operate in the Israeli settlements on the West Bank are among the most influential parties in this struggle. The CSCs are agents of the army, in that they are subject to the Military Justice Law and hold policing powers, but they are appointed by the settlements and see themselves as representing the settlements’ interests. This conflict of interests, combined with the absence of a clear definition of their powers and weak supervision of their actions, creates daily friction and clashes between the CSCs and settlement civilian guard usquads, on the one hand, and Palestinians farmers, on the other. In many cases the end result is that Palestinian landowners are unable to farm their land.
Across the country, heavily armed Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams are forcing their way into people’s homes in the middle of the night, often deploying explosive devices such as flashbang grenades to temporarily blind and deafen residents, simply to serve a search warrant on the suspicion that someone may be in possession of a small amount of drugs. Neighborhoods are not war zones, and our police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. However, the ACLU encountered this type of story over and over when studying the militarization of state and local law enforcement agencies.
This investigation gave us data to corroborate a trend we have been noticing nationwide: American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight. Using these federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals purportedly to wage the failed War on Drugs, the battlegrounds of which have disproportionately been in communities of color. But these arsenals are by no means free of cost for communities. Instead, the use of hyperaggressive tools and tactics results in tragedy for civilians and police officers, escalates the risk of needless violence, destroys property, and undermines individual liberties.
With the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual Border Security Expo, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, “You can’t go in there, give me back your badges.”
The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it...
The High Court of Justice is preparing to hear arguments on a petition brought by Arab residents of East Jerusalem against the state’s funding of private security guards to protect Jewish residents in several East Jerusalem settlement compounds.
About 370 private security guards in the state’s employ are active within the borders of Jewish settlement compounds in East Jerusalem that are home to approximately 2500 residents. The 67 million shekel annual budget for securing these settlements comes from the Ministry of Housing. The petition, filed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) in October 2011 on behalf of itself and the Arab residents, alleges that the security guards employed by the state are a de facto private police force in the exclusive service of Jewish residents.
AUGUSTA, Maine — The way law enforcement agencies in Israel work together to deal with threats is a model the United States can learn from, the chief of the Maine State Police said after returning from a weeklong training trip to the Middle East nation.
Before September 11, 2001, more than half the border crossings between the United States and Canada were left unguarded at night, with only rubber cones separating the two countries. Since then, that 4,000 mile “point of pride,” as Toronto’s Globe and Mail once dubbed it, has increasingly been replaced by a U.S. homeland security lockdown, although it’s possible that, like Egyptian-American Abdallah Matthews, you haven’t noticed...
In the early hours of Saturday, March 12, Yemeni security forces under the direction of Yemen’s Central Security Service (CSS) (which is commanded by Yahya Salih and is home to the U.S. funded and trained “counter-terror unit”) stormed the anti-government protesters’ camp near Sana’a University. The ensuing battle between the protesters and state security forces resulted in over 100 injured and two dead protesters. The violence continued across Yemen on Sunday with more injured protesters and one death reported in the southern port city of Aden...
Abstract: The intensification of militarized violence, racist terror and destructive dehumanization across the globe makes it imperative to examine the corresponding formations of securocratic regimes in the centres of power. With a focus on a united Europe, my essay interrogates the ubiquitous penetration of militarization into everyday life-worlds. My research suggests that in these interior borderlands, emergent cultures of militarization are normalized by recourse to racialization, criminalization and securitization, which in turn gives rise to new intimacies of violence, dehumanization and othering within expanding networks of fortification in a self-proclaimed white society.
The story of the Amungme and Kamoro peoples and U.S. mining corporation Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold ("Freeport") offers one of the best-documented examples of how local communities have experienced and resisted the seizure of their traditional lands by government-backed multinational mining enterprises...
We demand an end to the war against Black people. Since this country’s inception there have been named and unnamed wars on our communities. We demand an end to the criminalization, incarceration, and killing of our people. This includes:
- An immediate end to the criminalization and dehumanization of Black youth across all areas of society including, but not limited to; our nation’s justice and education systems, social service agencies, and media and pop culture. This includes an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services.
- An end to capital punishment.
- An end to money bail, mandatory fines, fees, court surcharges and “defendant funded” court proceedings.
- An end to the use of past criminal history to determine eligibility for housing, education, licenses, voting, loans, employment, and other services and needs.
- An end to the war on Black immigrants including the repeal of the 1996 crime and immigration bills, an end to all deportations, immigrant detention, and Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids, and mandated legal representation in immigration court.
- An end to the war on Black trans, queer and gender nonconforming people including their addition to anti-discrimination civil rights protections to ensure they have full access to employment, health, housing and education.
- An end to the mass surveillance of Black communities, and the end to the use of technologies that criminalize and target our communities (including IMSI catchers, drones, body cameras, and predictive policing software).
- The demilitarization of law enforcement, including law enforcement in schools and on college campuses.
- An immediate end to the privatization of police, prisons, jails, probation, parole, food, phone and all other criminal justice related services.
- Until we achieve a world where cages are no longer used against our people we demand an immediate change in conditions and an end to all jails, detention centers, youth facilities and prisons as we know them. This includes the end of solitary confinement, the end of shackling of pregnant people, access to quality healthcare, and effective measures to address the needs of our youth, queer, gender nonconforming and trans families.