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michael brown
Progressive Lawmakers Push Biden to Stop Transferring Military Weapons to Cops
In a letter led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), the 22 lawmakers called on Cabinet members to implement part of a May executive order signed by President Joe Biden aimed at reforming federal policing standards.
"Police militarization has never made our communities safer," Pressley tweeted. "It's time to stop transferring military-grade weapons to local police."
A provision of Executive Order 14704 requires administration agency heads to review military weapons transfers to law enforcement agencies, with an eye toward prohibiting such transfers when possible.
"Militarized law enforcement increases the prevalence of police violence without making our communities safer," the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
"For example, many types of equipment transferred under the Department of Defense's 1033 program have contributed to increasingly militarized law enforcement, which has in turn led to more prevalent police violence," the signers wrote, a reference the program facilitating the transfer of military equipment to federal, state, local, and tribal police.
According to the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law, "since its inception in 1990, the 1033 program has transferred more than $7.5 billion worth of surplus military equipment to subnational policing agencies," over 11,000 of which have registered for the program.
Noting the disproportionate impact of police militarization on communities of color, the letter asserts that "when law enforcement has access to military equipment, they are more likely to use it."
"The property listed in E.O. 14074 includes firearms and ammunition of .50 or greater caliber, firearm silencers, bayonets, grenades and grenade launchers, certain explosives, tracked and armored vehicles, weaponized drones and combat aircraft, and certain long-range acoustic devices," equipment that the lawmakers assert "should be prohibited from being transferred to or purchased by law enforcement agencies either with federal funds or from federal agencies or contractors," the letter states.
Widespread public concern about the 1033 program surfaced after the 2014 police killing of unarmed Black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the subsequent militarized police response to protests led by the nascent Black Lives Matter movement.
In 2015 then-President Barack Obama signed an executive order banning the transfer of tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers, and large-caliber weapons and ammunition. Agencies with such weapons in their arsenals were required to return them. The Pentagon said agencies returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers, and 1,623 bayonets in response to the order.
The 1033 program was in the news again during and after the 2020 racial justice protests following more police killings of Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade.
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Police De-Militarization Bill Reintroduced to Bar 'Gifts of Grenade Launchers and High-Caliber Rifles'
In the wake of the 2020 protests, Pressley introduced amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have ended the 1033 program. She re-introduced the failed measures earlier this year.
Statues, Statues, They All Fall Down
One of the most unexpected and remarkable aspects of the nationwide protests is how these demonstrations have spread to other parts of the world, including continental Europe and the United Kingdom. Protests are occurring
not just in British cities with sizable communities of black people--such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester--but also in cities north of the English border, like Glasgow and Edinburgh. The rallies that have taken place across the United Kingdom have reflected the outrage of people of many different ethnicities.
Like the United States, Britain has a protracted and shameful history of black deaths in police custody. A significant number of the placards held by British protesters have drawn attention to the abuse of black people in Britain, even as these signs also demanded an end to the transatlantic pandemic of racism--a pandemic which, like Covid-19, has claimed a grotesquely disproportionate number of black lives.
As could be expected, Black Lives Matter protests took place in Bristol, a city in the west of England with a long history of activism and protest emanating from its black communities. But few could have predicted that in the aftermath of the rally, activists would seek, in particularly dramatic fashion, to right a specific wrong and an injustice that had been well over a century in the making.
In Bristol's city center there has stood, from the late-nineteenth century onward, a statue of a merchant who shipped captured African men, women, and children, as part of what historians refer to as the Atlantic Slave Trade, or the Triangular Slave Trade. The merchant, Edward Colston, amassed considerable wealth from his trading activities and in doing so became an important philanthropist within the city, the benefits of his largesse still being enjoyed by modern-day Bristolians.
But just as there's a long history of activism in the United States around the removal of confederate monuments, people have spoken out against Colson's statue since it was erected in the late 19th century. In more recent years, those voices became more animated. Some sought a compromise by asking that a plaque be appended to the monument, drawing attention to how Colston amassed his fortune, and the price paid by hundreds of thousands of African people in this endeavor.
On June 7, matters came to a dramatic head when a number of Black Lives Matter protesters tore down the statue of Colston. For good measure, the damaged statue was rolled to the nearby docks in Bristol city center and dumped into the water of Bristol's harbor--the same harbor from which vessels set sail on their murderous voyages.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and senior government figures such as Home Secretary Priti Patel were quick to condemn what they declared to be acts of "thuggery," a racially loaded term if ever there was one.
Ironically, just as Johnson, Patel, and others have demanded the vigorous prosecution of those allegedly responsible for the toppling of the statue of Colston, politicians across the U.K. and throughout Europe began, at long last, to take preemptive action to remove statues of equally offensive figures.
These include a statue of the infamous King Leopold II of Belgium, who presided over unspeakable horrors inflicted on the people of the Congo. He was a monarch who ruthlessly and mercilessly exploited both the land and the people of a vast expanse of central Africa. One of his preferred methods to induce harder labor in the Congo, and punish those he believed to be slackers, was to amputate the hands, feet, and limbs of men, women, and children.
What started in Minnesota has the potential to do more than address systemic problems in the United States; people on the other side of the Atlantic have taken these protests into remarkable, extraordinary, and wholly unforeseen directions.
There are numerous statues of him across Belgium, and one of them, in a supposed gesture of retribution, had a hand severed some years ago; another was unceremoniously removed. But one Leopold II statue that's still standing bears a particularly deplorable inscription: "I have undertaken the work in the Congo in the interest of civilization and for the good of Belgium."
In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan, in response to the toppling of the Colson statue, announced a review of the many statues and street names with explicit links to Britain's involvement in the slave trade. A statue of the notorious slaveholder Robert Milligan was already being removed from outside the Museum of London Docklands. Milligan owned several sugar plantations and hundreds of enslaved people in the British colony of Jamaica--He was just one of the many slaveholders and imperialists that were honored in public spaces in Britain.
Parallels can--and should--be drawn between the belated removal of Confederate statues and monuments throughout the South, and the similarly belated removal of statues of brutes such as Colston and Milligan.
What started in Minnesota has the potential to do more than address systemic problems in the United States; people on the other side of the Atlantic have taken these protests into remarkable, extraordinary, and wholly unforeseen directions.
Names of some of those taken by police brutality in the United Kingdom (as seen on placard above): Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg, Sheki Bayoh, Leon Briggs, Christopher Aider, Joy Gardner, Cynthia Jarrett, Cherry Groce, Smiley Culture, Michael Powell, Ricky Bishop, Brian Douglas, Leon Patterson, Derek Bennett, Sarah Reed, Roger Sylvester, Azelle Rodney, Mzee Mohammed, Edson Da Costa, Rashan Charles, Kevin Clarke, Luigi Basile, Leroy Junior Medford, Shane Bryant, Oghene Abboh, Demetre Fraser.
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