Fear of the White Nation

Images from Ferguson continue to be broadcast around the world, provoking gaping stares at a Missouri town that looks more like Gaza or Donetsk than anything in the world’s oldest democracy. It’s a story with plenty of hot-button plot elements, a microcosm of what’s wrong with America: racism and murder, police militarization and brutality, press censorship, authoritarian disregard for long established rights and laws. It leaves no one indifferent.

My own reaction continues to be one of dismay and disbelief. “What have these people done with my country?” Yet a more nuanced view might be called for. Is Ferguson really symptomatic of an illness in American society or is it a “perfect storm” event, one whose circumstances are based on real problems but exaggerate them to an unusual degree.

One of the most commented themes about Ferguson is the “militarization of the police”. That is a trend which has been going on for a long time. I might have been a generation removed from Andy Griffith and Mayberry, but the cops in my time still used revolvers and squad cars, not assault rifles and armored personnel carriers. But the change in police armament predates 9-11 and was a response to the growing threat posed by well-armed drug traffickers and their gangs in major cities. Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, major metropolitan police forces upgraded their equipment: bullet-proof vests became standard; revolvers were turned in for high-capacity pistols; SWAT teams were organized and expanded.

The first Special Weapons And Tactics team was organized in Philadelphia in 1964, but it was the 1967 LAPD team that gained national attention and became the model for all subsequent organizations. SWAT was the specific response to the growing civil unrest which were rocking the country in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: the Symbionese Liberation Army shoot-out and the Watts Riots were seminal events in the decision to have a special force of heavily armed, highly trained officers available to deal with unusual situations.

The number of SWAT teams grew rapidly. In 1967, there were just two. By 1975, there were approximately 500. Criminologist Dr. Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University has done extensive research on this long-term trend[1]. He concludes that both the number of teams and the frequency of their use have continued to grow.

• In 1983 only 13% of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had SWAT teams; by 2005, it was 80%.
• The trend in the number of SWAT raids has also increased: from a few hundred per year in the 1970’s; to an average of 3,000 per year in the 1980’s; to over 50,000 in 2005.

This growth in numbers and frequency of raids contrasts sharply with long-term crime trends kept by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting database[2]. Since 1990:

• Homicide and burglary rates have fallen by 60%;
• Robbery and simple assaults have fallen by 40%;
• Aggravated assaults have fallen by 33%;
• Sexual assault rates have fallen by 23%.[3]

Within these figures there is a wide variance in results between metropolitan areas as well as between high density urban, suburban and rural areas. Suburban crime rates have risen while high density urban rates have fallen, but suburban crime starts from a far lower base.

There is also very little to the contention that police forces around the country need to be issued advanced weaponry and trained in military tactics to keep one step ahead of the criminals. FBI statistics again show that less than 1% of all homicides, including firearm-related homicides, involve the use of military-grade weapons. That vast majority of deaths come from pistols and revolvers, not long arms, much less semi-automatic weapons. So why do so many small town sheriffs need M-4 carbines and armored personnel carriers?

Yet that is precisely the sort of equipment they are receiving. The Center for Investigative Reporting shows that the Department of Homeland Security has handed out $35 billion in grants to since 2002, much of it going to purchasing military-grade hardware and tactical training programs. The Pentagon has also contributed, with over $500 million in surplus war stocks in 2011 alone.[4] For example, Hawaii used DHS grants to purchase a BearCat armored vehicle for $240,000 that is used in conjunction with a $330,000 mobile-command post. New Hampshire also bought two armored vehicles for $378,000, while Hidalgo County, Texas spent $346,000 on their own armored vehicle[5].

These are only a few examples, but $35 billion goes a long way and there are many more cases I could cite. What do these counties need such heavy weaponry for? Are they really expecting waves endless waves of bearded terrorists to appear like in a bad Chuck Norris movie[6], to be conveniently gunned down?

None of these trends necessarily guarantee that police forces across the nation must become distanced from the public they serve or more authoritarian and brutal in their tactics, but they certainly contribute. It is a perfectly well-understood response based on human nature; call it the “boys with toys” response. Owning a Maserati does not oblige anyone to dangerously exceed the speed limit, but it is likely to generate the desire to do so on occasion. Being decked out like a soldier, with a soldier’s equipment, and then being trained on tactics used by soldiers – well, one has a natural tendency to start acting like a soldier rather than a law enforcement officer.

The training a soldier receives is vastly different than that of a police officer, despite the fact that both use firearms. When I was in the 101^st Division, our motto was not “Protect and Serve”, it was “Strike Force” and we marched to cadences like: “What makes the grass grow? Blood! Blood! Blood!” But while that is wholly appropriate for the rough business of soldiering, it is obviously inappropriate for law enforcement. That is why one of the primordial fears of the Founding Fathers was a standing army, and why Congress approved the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibited the use of Armed Forces for the enforcement of domestic laws[7]. There was always supposed to be a clear line between the military and the police. That line has been blurred significantly.

Gravely aggravating this problem is the thoughtlessness of our politicians. Politicians on both sides have serially abused military terminology and applied them inappropriately to domestic issues. President Johnson launched the War against Poverty; President Reagan launched the War against Drugs; President Bush had the War against Terror[8]. This undoubtedly stems in part from the role of the Executive as Commander-in-Chief; and also from the nostalgic associations of the “Good War” that hark back to the fight against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Unfortunately, most wars are not as clearly black-and-white as that conflict; and in any case, none of the declared “wars” are in the least amenable to victory. I have it on good authority that the poor we shall always have with us[9], and the same could be said of drug addiction and the threat of radicals and extremists.

The terminology is wholly inappropriate: wars are fought between the armed forces of sovereign states and begun and ended by acts of Congress. Wars are fought between soldiers, and when the police are the front-line troops, of course they begin to act like soldiers. Further arm them as soldiers and train them in counter-insurgency tactics and who can be surprised that they start to think of themselves as soldiers? The problem then becomes one of identification: in our newest war on “Terror”, how do you know who the terrorist is? If anyone and everyone can be a terrorist, then anyone and everyone is a potential threat, and the law enforcement officer feels justified in demanding instant obedience and using deadly force at the slightest provocation. They want to go home at night too, after all.

Wars demand great sacrifice: even Lincoln suspended habeus corpus during the Civil War, for example. Sometimes it is necessary to curtail our civil liberties in order to ensure their preservation during a great conflagration: press censorship is more generally accepted as a means of ensuring that sensitive information is not inadvertently or deliberately passed to the enemy. We understand and accept the need for measures which might otherwise be repugnant in peace-time. But the wars when the wars become permanent and the battles are fought in our cities and neighborhoods, then so too does the loss of our liberty become permanent.

It begs the question: is the militarized police the threat to our civil rights, or have these already been so curtailed that police actions fall well within their far diminished scope?

Bottom Rail on Top

There remains an undeniable element of racism which runs throughout our society and permeates every aspect of it in ways we are not always aware. It has been there since colonists to Jamestown brought along a few black slaves along with them, through the Civil War, and to this very day. The fear of the white nation has driven some of the most hysterical propaganda our country has ever seen. Before the Civil War, the Old South lived in constant – and perhaps justified – fear of servile insurrection, of the field hands creeping through the windows and murdering the good white folk in their beds. Not much has really changed: sociological test after test shows the Caucasians react far more negatively towards blacks than they do towards any other ethnic group in identical situations.

Interwoven with this fear is a visceral loathing of the possibility and results of miscegenation. It was not just Adolf Hitler who spoke of the Americans as a “mongrel race”[10]; mainstream American politicians until the end of the Second World War also maintained that the virile purity of the white race must be preserved. It was only after the war, when the depths of evil that Hitler’s racial policies had unleashed were revealed, that it no longer became possible to openly speak of the subject. But to think that it went away would be foolish, and to this day there are a disturbing number of people who believe in such pseudo-scientific idiocy.

Nazi racial theories may no longer be au currant, but racism is alive and well in America. It has been nurtured by different forces at different times: the wholly degenerative master-slave relationship that necessitated a belief in racial inferiority, even a separation of species, along with the fear of servile insurrection; the Reconstruction Era fear in Northern cities that waves of freed slaves would flock to northern factories and displace white workers from their jobs[11]; up until the 1950’s “separate but equal” held sway because many whites sincerely believed that Black Americans were incapable of meeting the standards of whites if they shared the same schools, factories or military. We can perversely thank the meat grinder warfare of the XXth Century for creating so acute a demand for warm bodies in uniform that national politics across the industrialized world were forced to recognize the need for racial and gender equality.

Today, the “white nation”[12] still lives in fear. It lives in fear of its inexorable demographic marginalization. It lives in fear of a “brown America”. It lives in fear of its economic stagnation. It lives in fear of change. And it is right to do so (from a certain point of view).

American demographics really are moving toward a non-Caucasian majority in the near future. Non-Hispanic whites will remain the single largest racial grouping, but sometime between 2040 and 2045 they will cease to be a majority in this country.

The stagnation of wealth and income exacerbates the fear and disquiet of middle class and blue collar whites who face an increasingly uncertain and even insurmountable struggle to maintain themselves, much less progress up the social ladder. It doesn’t matter that Hispanics and Black Americans are even worse off: the imagined threat from the bottom is still viewed as more dangerous than the concentration of wealth at the top, perhaps because there is so little interaction between the middle classes and the stratospherically wealthy anymore.

Fear of stagnation, loss of power, fear of the “other”: these are a powerful and noxious mix of sentiment. This picture is perhaps too bleak though. I am still talking about a minority; and vocal and violent minority that is becoming increasingly radicalized, but a minority nonetheless. Our country has taken great strides: electing a black man for President and then re-electing him; furthering the rights and equality of our LGBT fellow citizens. The progress man should not be dismissed out of hand or overshadowed by incidents like those of Ferguson.

America is going through a painful and potentially dangerous transition as demographic, economic and technological forces reshape our society. These changes are mostly positive, but they carry risks as well. John Adams said: “Entrust no man with the power to endanger the public liberty,” and today we have a potentially dangerous mix of a digital society, a pervasive and permissive mass surveillance apparatus, a degree of paranoia provoked by terrorist attacks on our country, and militarized police force that dwarfs the regular Army in size and presence. There is no guarantee that someone one will not rise to power who is unscrupulous enough or self-righteous enough to seize these disparate reins and bring them together in an imperial Presidency. Who is to say that with another 9/11 attack the American people might not clamor for such a person? “He who trades liberty for security will end up with neither.” We ignore Benjamin Franklin and John Adams at our peril.

I’ve written before now that the first necessary step must be a symbolic one made by the President: it is time to end the War on Terror. Osama Bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda is dismantled. Let’s declare victory. Of course there are still threats to our security: ISIS needs to be destroyed and there are jihadist cells across Northern Africa and the Middle East. But we can fight them without being in a state of permanently sacrificing our civil liberties.

Congress should also enact legislation requiring all law enforcement officers to wear video recorders in the performance of their duties. When the Rialto, CA police department issued recorders to all of their officers, the use of force by officers fell 60% and citizen complaints fell 88% within a year.[13] Those are heartening statistics for a change. A fraction of the $35 billion being handed out by DHS would be enough to equip America’s police forces. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics[14], in 2008 there were approximately 1.2 million law enforcement officers at the Federal, State and Local levels. At $400 per device, it would cost the taxpayer only $500 million to equip all of these officers with portable cameras. That’s about 1.5% of the total handed out by DHS.

Eventually, Americans will have to confront the more ridiculous aspects of our gun culture. I fully support the Second Amendment and an individual’s right to bear arms; but the duty to bear arms safely and knowledgeably is attendant to the exercise of that right. When gun owners walk around shopping malls and department stores with loaded semi-automatic rifles, the only point they are making is their own imbecility and disregard for the safety of their fellow citizens. When you couple “open carry” to “stand your ground”, another concept taken to a radical extreme, what you have is an open season on black people. Police can hardly be expected to reduce their armament if you have nutters walking about the streets of the town with M-16’s strapped to the backs.

Precisely because I wish to see the Second Amendment preserved for future generations, I strongly urge states to reign in “open carry” and “stand your ground laws”. Enough people have died because of them.

There are many circumstances that have made the tragic events of Ferguson explode into the media limelight and stay there. It was not just the death of Michael Brown, because in our country, black youths are killed almost routinely without anyone raising an eyebrow. That is unacceptable. The excessive response of the authorities was also unacceptable. But what is truly unacceptable is that we continue to tolerate all of this. The police remain a reflection of the societies they serve; the ugliness and violence of the police is only a mirror of today’s America. It is not the America I grew up in, and it is not an America I particularly like. To take the famous Fundakelic phrase out of context: “free your mind and your ass will follow.”

Americans, time to free our minds from the shackles of our fears and prejudices. Then perhaps our children will be safe in their schools, and 18-year olds will not be riddled with bullets by those that should be protecting them.

Sources and Notes

[1] Radley Balko, “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” The Wall Street Journal, 07 August 2013

[2] Uniform Crime Reporting statistical database, Federal Bureau of Investigation

[3] Elizabeth Kneebone and Steven Raphael, “City and Suburban Crime Trends in Metropolitan America,” Metropolitan Policy Program, The Brookings Institute, May 2011

[4] Center for Investigative Reporting,

[5] G.W. Schulz, “G.W. Schulz, “What does the killing of a small girl say about police raids in an age of terror?” The Center for Investigative Reporting, 26 May 2010

[6] “Invasion USA”—a classic!

[7] The Act applies only to the Federal Armed Forces, not to the National Guard, which is under state control, nor to the Coast Guard, which has maritime police jurisdiction as well as being a component of the Armed Forces.

[8] It is also symptomatic of our culture that of the three, we’ve only officially given up on the War on Poverty.

[9] Mark 14:7 (there are many other similar verses in the New Testament).

[10] Germans found it somewhat ludicrous that they were being taught racial equality theory by a segregated, Jim Crow army. In fact, Germany POW’s were often accorded better treatment by white American soldiers than what they showed to their black comrades-in-arms. Heide Fehrenbach, “Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America,” Princeton University Press, 2005

[11] To be perfectly fair, though, this fear was not restricted solely to blacks. Other immigrant groups were also targets of violent reaction for their perceived economic competition: the Irish were viewed as little better than skin-wearing drunken savages, while the Italians were often compared to “half-Moorish” mongrel illiterates, especially as so many came from Southern Italy and Sicily. Hitler hardly invented racial politics; he was merely the first to implement it on a vast, industrial scale.

[12] I do not refer to Caucasians in general, but rather to those Caucasians who self-identify with a “white nation” based on exclusive ethnic, religious and cultural lines.  This includes, but is not limited to, white supremacists.

[13]“What Happens When Police Officers Wear Body Cameras,” The Wall Street Journal, 18 August 2014

[14]Brian A. Reaves, “Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2008”, US Department of Justice, July 2011