Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Netfa Freeman about Trump’s police “surge” for the November 8, 2019, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Corporate media made Donald Trump's recent speech to a conference of police chiefs in Chicago a story about the hate/hate relationship between Trump and the city, and in particular its black superintendent, who didn't attend. Factchecking consisted of noting that, actually, homicides are down in Chicago, and rehashing Trump's fabricated tale about a cop who told him he could "fix" the city's violence “in one day.”
For the press, Trump's comment that “Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison” was just another slam at the city, proof of how histrionic Trump is, and even how unpatriotic: He imagines the US could be as bad as someplace else. But for black communities in Chicago and elsewhere, the comparison to an occupied country isn't outlandish at all. In fact, Trump announced an alarming plan to escalate the militarization of the police, unleashing what he called “a new crackdown on violent crime,” “targeting gangs and drug traffickers” in cities and rural areas. It will be, he said, “very dramatic”: “Let's call it ‘The Surge.’”
What fresh horrors this administration has in mind under the guise of a new crackdown on crime ought to be of grave concern to the press. It assuredly is to communities across the country.
Joining us now to talk about that is Netfa Freeman. He's events coordinator and policy analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Netfa Freeman.
Netfa Freeman: Thank you for having me, Janine.
JJ: Donald Trump explicitly boasted of making $600 million worth of surplus military equipment available to local law enforcement, saying, “If you remember, the previous administration didn't want to do that.... They didn't want to make you look so tough. They didn't want to make you look like you're a threat." I didn't read that, though, in the New York Times report, but in Jake Johnson's piece on Common Dreams; the Times told me Trump "struck a law-and-order tone.”
Well, law enforcement being encouraged to see themselves as “at war” is a different story when you're the enemy, right? What do you make, first of all, of media's burying the lead on this? “Let's call it ‘The Surge’”? I mean, the headline wrote itself. What do you make of this whole event, and of media's kind of non-response to it?
NF: Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I don't think it really should be surprising, and I think it's less about Donald Trump and their declared “surge” than it is about the intrinsic nature of law enforcement as entities for control and containment. They're actually counterparts to what the military does abroad, is what the police do here.
I think what helps us understand it is if we understand this country as a settler colony, and settler colonialism as a system that persists. Not settlers being something in history that happened—the Pilgrims and then it's over; it persists in terms of indigenous people’s rights being curtailed, and also in enslaved Africans being brought here. That same relationship of colonizer to colonized, particularly under the settler colonial paradigm, still exists.
And the antecedents of the police were the slave patrols, that's where it evolved out of. And it becomes even more of an understanding if—for example, Donald Trump makes his pronouncement trying to disparage Barack Obama, but I mean, he hasn't even reached Barack Obama's achievement of having expanded the 1033 Program, which is the Department of Defense program that authorizes the transfer of military equipment to local police forces. Under Barack Obama, this program expanded by 2,400%. And this is not a new program, and precedes Barack Obama all the way back to 1990. It was authorized in an act called the National Defense Authorization Act of 1990, which first started it. And you also hear, with the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the concern over police killings of us with impunity and brutalization, you hear about the repair of the community’s distrust of police, instead of looking at root causes of that distrust, being the violations the police commit against the people.
JJ: I wanted to say one thing about whatever may happen. Trump is announcing something that we're told Attorney General Barr is going to roll out soon, and I want to just say one thing about the media coverage we’re likely to see, which is, you're talking about getting to the actual root of what police are for. And I know that with the rollout of this, there’s going to become this distinction between violent criminals.... that this is targeted, you know, this is just about "violent criminals."
This is the oldest strategy. We always see the aid cutoffs, pretending to distinguish between "deserving" and "undeserving" poor; we see this attempt to separate immigrants against one another. And I'm afraid that media are going to see some significance in this idea that this is a targeted crackdown. And what I wanted to say about it is, in Trump's speech in Chicago—which media had so little interest in, relatively—he indicated how wide the de facto net was going to be. He identified the enemy when he talked about how, before him, he said, “Radical activists freely trafficked in violent anti-police hostility, and criminals grew only more emboldened as a result.”
Nobody should fool themselves that anything that calls itself being about "crime” is about crime at all.
Netfa Freeman: "The police and law enforcement are needed to sustain the status quo, and put down threats to the status quo that emanate from the people, but particularly organized and politically conscious formations and efforts."
NF: That's right. You hit it on the head, and we can't divorce this development from the development of the FBI’s designation of “Black Identity Extremists,” the actual use of the 1033 Program and the militarized police in the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, and all these things. And even in the earlier times, the real use of SWAT, and its starting, was against the Black Panther Party. And so what they're really seeing—and I'm referring to the purveyors of the world power elite—are threats to the system, that are really coming out of the results of neoliberal policies, which increase unemployment, which increase all these different disparities, and [they] have much more of what would be considered a surplus population that they have to contain and control.
Under the "war on drugs", most of the people that were subject to the mass incarceration that was a result were nonviolent people dealing with drug charges (and some of them weren't really guilty of them). So it really is something that we should be concerned with, in terms of an intensified fascism.
And not only is the media very tellingly silent, so are the Democratic candidates and policymakers who claim to be a "resistance," and claim to be against Trump. They at least made some pronouncements of standing up to the egregious and very draconian immigration policies and the lock-up of people. This has implications for that same thing, but they're not talking about it. And so they have to, at some point.
This is where we see the bipartisan consensus: The police and law enforcement are needed to sustain the status quo, and put down threats to the status quo that emanate from the people, but particularly organized and politically conscious formations and efforts.
JJ: Well, yes, and going right from that, I think we do see people, despite the void of corporate media—and the stories that I saw on this, I would say again, were independent media, some college media, and also libertarians, who are concerned about the feds getting involved in local law enforcement — but even around those media voids, we see people pushing back at a deeper level, at a more structural level, not only protesting when police kill somebody, for example, but recognizing when criminality is being manufactured—and I'm thinking about here in New York, with this new crackdown on people who don't pay subway fares.
We saw major action just this week, with Decolonize This Place and others—“cop-hating law breakers” as the New York Post had it—converging to protest and to say, “We're not going to turn against ourselves. We don't buy your divisions of ‘criminal’ and ‘law-abiding,’ we don't respect that whole system.”
NF: Yeah, we should really boost up some of these programs and campaigns that are on the ground. The Black Alliance for Peace recently launched, it's been a few months now, our campaign “Defeat War Against African/Black People in the US and Abroad,” making the links between the militarization of the world, particularly AFRICOM, the US Africa command, and the 1033 Program here. The campaign is focused on mass incarceration, police exchanges with Israel — which we really need to pay attention to, it speaks to the shared settler colonial nature, and why they have so much interest together, the police in Israel and here train each other, and share different ways of controlling the population, the so-called "exposing" of elected officials, making them take a position, rather, on things like the Blue Lives Matter bill, that makes it a hate crime to assault a police officer (which, we know, the assault of police officers can be really misused). That campaign is trying to nationalize and get louder voices around this militarization of police, and the repression that ends up happening within black and brown working-class communities.
An organization that I'm in, it’s a member organization of the Black Alliance for Peace, is Pan-African Community Action (PACA), here in Washington, DC. And one of the campaigns that we have, that’s also within the policy platforms of the Movement for Black Lives, is Community Control Over Police, asserting that the communities that have these armed forces in them should be able to decide who these armed forces are, what the priorities of these armed forces are, who gets to be police, what happens if they do something, you know, misconduct, if they get fired—they'd have the power to do that. Not advocate to review boards or oversights or anything, but actually have a democratic process of community control over public safety and police, which is something that is possible to have, and should be the democratic right of people.
And we're not the only ones doing that. There’s other formations around the country that are calling for community control of the police, which is a just thing that shifts power and takes it out of the traditional legacy that police grow out of, and makes “ Protect and Serve” a real policy, versus some kind of public relations ploy.
And so those are the kind of things that we have going on, and I think people should check into that, and look at the history and the role and purpose, and how the militarization of the police and the US trajectory to militarize the world, how they’re related.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, community control of police; we've been talking on the show about community control of banks, public control of utilities; the community control of police seems absolutely of a piece with that. It seems like an idea that ten years ago, I'm not sure what people would have said, but I think folks are more than ready to have that kind of conversation right now.
NF: If I can say that the history of it goes back to the Black Panther Party, during the ’60s; they actually got it as a referendum on the ballot, which is what we're trying to do, in ballot initiative. And almost won, in Oakland, I think; it was California, but I'm not sure if it was Oakland specifically. And it had to be actually sabotaged, in terms of the campaign, for them to lose; they lost by a very close margin. But that's where the history comes from.
JJ: The work that you're doing is linking, of course, black people in the United States and in Africa and elsewhere. And I think seeing Americans through an international prism, you know, and thinking about communities that are affected by police brutality, and the way that they would be looked at by a UN rapporteur, for example. It's an unusual position, I think, for a lot of US citizens. And I think it's a useful prism. It's a hopeful way forward, I think, to think about making these connections across across national borders.
NF: Yes it is, and it's very necessary, and it helps people get out of the American exceptionalism that manifests itself in more than the obvious ways, just the fact that the United States can put sanctions on a country, for some so-called benevolent purpose, and have no more moral authority, or legitimacy, to be able to do such a thing... and have their troops all around the world and all kinds of US command forces, networks all around the world, at the expense of people here, in terms of basic human needs, and things like universal healthcare and education that they could be funding, and also at the expense of the safety and livelihood of people outside of this country. So we really have to, like what you mentioned, this is our effort to try to establish a real internationalism.
JJ: We've been speaking with Netfa Freeman, events coordinator and policy analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies. Netfa Freeman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NF: Thank you.
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