Occupy Wall Street - Page 149

The 99 percent organize themselves

Jeremy Brecher

In mid-October I spent two days and a night with Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park. Since then I’ve read a barrage of advice for what OWS and its companion movements around the world should be doing. But I’ve been haunted by another question: What should those of us who are sympathetic to OWS (according to polls, roughly two-thirds of Americans are), but are not going to relocate to a downtown park, be doing to advance the wellbeing of the 99 percent?

I got one part of my answer as I groggily logged on to the web at 5:30 the morning after I returned home from Zuccotti Park. When I left the park, its private owner Brookfield Properties had announced it would clear the park “for cleaning” and enforce rules preventing tarps, sleeping bags, and lying down. Mayor Bloomberg said the NYPD would enforce those rules, effectively ending the encampment.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the eviction. When OWS put out a call for support, thousands of people began to converge on the park for nonviolent resistance to eviction. Unions called on their members to protect the encampment. The president of the AFL-CIO’s Central Labor Council lobbied the city to cancel the crackdown. Lawyers prepared to bring suit to protect the occupiers’ first amendment rights. City council members and other New York politicians lobbied the mayor to halt the eviction. Against all expectation, Mayor Bloomberg announced that Brookfield was abandoning the “cleanup” plan and the company announced it would try to reach an accommodation with the occupiers. The mobilization of supporters had forced the Mayor and the park owners to back down. I had my first answer to what the rest of the 99 percent can do: Protect the occupations.

Since then, there have been similar mobilizations to protect occupations in cities from Atlanta to Oakland. Many have involved a similar combination of public officials, trade unions, and rank-and-file 99 percenters just showing up to defend their rights. In one extraordinary case, law enforcement officials themselves were responsible for saving the Occupy Albany encampment in Academy Park across from the State Capitol and City Hall. As protests grew, Police Chief Steven Krokoff issued an internal memo stating, “I have no intention of assigning officers to monitor, watch, videotape or influence any behavior that is conducted by our citizens peacefully demonstrating in Academy Park” and that the department would respond “in the same manner that we do on a daily basis” to any reported crime.

According to the Albany Times-Union, Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings, under pressure from the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, thereupon directed city police to arrest several hundred Occupy Albany protesters. The police refused. The Times-Union reported that “State Police supported the defiant posture of Albany police leaders to hold off making arrests for the low-level offense of trespassing, in part because of concern it could incite a riot or draw thousands of protesters in a backlash that could endanger police and the public.” According to the official, “The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor.” Meanwhile, Albany County District Attorney David Soares informed the mayor and police officials that, “Unless there is property damage or injuries to law enforcement we don’t prosecute people for protesting.”

A 99 Percent Movement?

I remember well how the movement against the Vietnam war, so powerful among the youth on America’s campuses in the 1960s, was largely isolated from the rest of the country. Something very different is happening right now, however: The Occupy movements have been building alliances through direct action mutual aid. And 99 percenters are connecting with them and utilizing their spirit and methods to contest their own injustices. The result is that OWS, instead of becoming isolated, is morphing before our eyes into what some are calling the 99 Percent Movement.

When Rose Gudiel received an eviction notice for her modest home in La Puente, a working class suburb of Los Angeles, she announced, “We’re not leaving.” She and her family hunkered down while dozens of friends and supporters camped in their yard, determined to resist. When thousands started to gather outside Los Angeles City Hall to launch “Occupy LA,” Rose Gudiel went down and told her story to one of its first General Assemblies. A group from Occupy LA joined the vigil at her home and some stayed to camp out. Next Rose Gudiel and an Occupy LA delegation protested in front of the $26 million dollar Bel Air mansion of Steve Mnuchin, CEO of OneWest, which serviced her mortgage. Next day they held a sit-in at the Pasadena regional office of Fannie Mae, where Rose Gudiel’s 63-year old disabled mother made an impassioned plea to save her home and nine protesters were arrested – all broadcast that night on the TV news. The next day Rose Gudiel received a letter from the bank saying her eviction had been called off and soon she had a deal for a renegotiated mortgage. Housing advocates are now considering a campaign called “Let a thousand Roses bloom.” MSNBC commented that Rose Gudiel provides “an example of how the sprawling “Occupy” movement – often criticized for its lack of focus – can lend muscle to specific goals pursued by organizations and individuals.”

An alliance has been developing between the occupations around the country and many different layers of organized labor. In New York a group from OWS joined a march of 500 to a Verizon store held to support the contract campaign of Verizon workers. “We’re all in this together,” 53-year-old Steven Jackman, a Verizon worker from Long Island, said about Occupy Wall Street. In Albany, New York, Occupy Albany joined a protest outside the State Capitol featuring a roasted pig wearing a gold top hat, sporting a gold chain and chomping on a cigar. The adoption of OWS themes and language was apparent. A local union official said, “The corporate pig’s been out there, taking a bite out of America, out of the 99 percent, for years and I’m inviting all of the 99 percent of America to come on down today and take a bite out of the corporate pig.”

The collaboration of OWS and labor can take some unusual forms. To support art handlers of the Teamsters’ union, activists from OWS started showing up at Sotheby’s auctions, masquerading as clients. They would suddenly stand up and, instead of offering a bid, disrupt the proceedings with loud denunciations of the company’s labor practices. OWS activists likewise went to a Manhattan restaurant owned by a prominent Sotheby’s board member, clinked on glasses for silence, and then denounced the company as a union-buster. Jason Ide, president of the Teamsters local that represents the art handlers, told the Washington Post that the Occupy tactics surprised and inspired him and his members – so much so that the workers have become regulars at OWS. “Now is this rare opportunity for labor unions, and especially the union leadership, to take some pointers,” for example by considering the civil-disobedience approach taken by Occupy demonstrations.

Meanwhile, a close working relationship has developed between climate and environmental activists and the Occupy movement. A number of environmental activists, including Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, were early endorses of the Occupy movement, and a delegation from Occupy DC marched to join a rally against the Keystone XL pipeline. Next a group of students and climate activists organized an “#OccupyStateDept” action and occupied the area outside the Ronald Reagan Building overnight to protest the Keystone XL pipeline – and to secure admission to a hearing on the pipeline the next day. Ethan Nuss, who had stood in line for 14 hours, told the hearing, “Every day I wake up and work for a vision in this country of a 100 percent clean energy economy that will create jobs for my generation when my generation is facing the largest unemployment since the Great Depression.” Bill McKibben urged pipeline opponents to join the Occupy DC encampment and invited Occupy DC to join the upcoming anti-pipeline action at the White House.

Bringing It All Back Home

Just as workers, community residents, students, and even housewives in the 1930s adopted the “sit-down strike” to address their grievances, so the robust but nonviolent direct action of the Occupy movements is being adopted by diverse communities and constituencies to address their own concerns. For example, a hundred students and teachers recently occupied a New York Board of Education meeting to protest budget cutbacks, layoffs, large class sizes and overemphasis on standardized testing. After the city school chancellor and school board members fled the meeting, the crowd held an impromptu “general assembly.” Her voice amplified by the echo of the “people’s microphone,” an elementary school student named Indigo told the assembly,

“Mic check. I’m Indigo, and I am an eight-year-old third grader, and I’m sad Ms. Cunningham is doing work for free. I don’t think it’s fair that teachers are getting laid off. The thing that would help me learn more would be if we had smaller classes. My teacher, Ms. Lamar, has to shout to be heard.”

99 percenters are also bringing the OWS message back into their own communities. For example, OWSers joined a protest in Harlem against “stop and frisk” racial profiling by law enforcement officials. Soon, activists began holding Occupy Harlem General Assemblies. And civil rights and labor groups, including the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, the National Action Network, and the New York State and New York City chapters of the NAACP organized their own rally in City Hall Park and march to the Zuccotti Park to show their support for the OWS movement.

Occupy College provides another example of how 99 percenters are taking the Occupy message – and mode of self-organization -- into other arenas. It is organized both to support the Occupations around the country and around the world, and to address the specific issues affecting college students like the cost of education and the burden of college debt that have been important themes of the Occupy movements. Occupy College has established a website and is initiating National Solidarity Teach-ins in early November at colleges around the country.

While there has been a lot of debate in recent years about face-to-face vs. Internet organizing, in fact the Occupy and 99-percenter movements have brilliantly combined the two. While many Occupy groups and General Assemblies have been highly local, there is also widespread self-organization occurring on the web by groups such “Knitters for Occupy Wall St” and “Knitters for the 99 Percent” linking people all over the country who are making warm clothes for the occupiers. Here are some ways 99-percenters might want to think about organizing with their own real and virtual communities:

· Bring a speaker from your local Occupy group to a meeting in your living room or to whatever organizations you belong to.

· Organize a General Assembly in your neighborhood to discuss the issues of the 99 percent. Discuss what is upsetting people and decide on some concrete action to address it.

· If your PTA supports teachers’ jobs and programs for low-income students, get them to visit their political representatives and also do a joint action with your local Occupy group.

· If your church’s food pantry or homeless shelter needs money, hold an action at your local bank offices demanding that they feed the homeless in “their” community. If they won’t, ask your elected officials to take a look at the benefits they receive from “their” community. (Remember, according to Mayor Bloomberg it was the threat of city council officials to look into benefits received by the owners of Zuccotti Park that led them to back off their efforts to shut down OWS.)

· Create a Facebook page for your own equivalent of “Knitters for the 99 Percent.”

· Create a group to monitor local media and to protest when they favor the concerns of the 1 percent over those of the 99 percent.

· Organize public hearings in your town about what’s really happening to the 99 percent and how the 1 percent’s power is affecting them.

· Create your own temporary occupations in your own milieu addressing concerns about housing, jobs, media, or whatever else concerns you and your fellow 99 percenters.

While the connections that have developed with unions are of great importance, we need to remember that the great majority of 99 percenters don’t have unions. Self-organization of non-union workers is a crucial next step. Take some of your co-workers down to visit your local occupation. Invite someone from your local Occupy group to meet with people from your workplace. Discuss what support you can give each other and the 99-Percent movement.

The Power of the Powerless

There is clearly a bigger movement growing out of the Occupy movement. But how will it develop? Some expect it to become like the Tea Party, a pressure group within the political party system. Others imagine something like the Tahrir Square demonstrations that toppled the Mubarak regime in one concentrated upheaval.

Neither of these visions takes enough account of the role of “secondary institutions” – schools, religious congregations, workplaces, communities, ethnic groups, and subcultures – in American society. The cooperation and acquiescence of these institutions provide the “pillars of support” on which both the government and the corporations depend – and through which their power can be humbled. And they provide arenas in which people can make change that will genuinely affect their lives long before they are powerful enough to defeat corporate control of national politics.

In our top-down, corporate-controlled political system, even our political parties and local governments can be considered secondary institutions. Those who are active in political parties and organizations can play a role supporting the Occupy movements and addressing the needs of the 99 percent. You can invite a speaker from your local Occupation group; support them in the street; and insist your organization’s leaders and the politicians it supports take a pro-Occupation stand. You can identify ways in which your organization and those it supports acquiesce in the interests of the 1 percent and demand that they stop.

The same is true of local governments. In Los Angeles, for example, the City Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting "the continuation of the peaceful and vibrant exercise in First Amendment Rights" of the Occupy LA.

Beyond that, local governments and political parties can start pursuing the interests of the 99 percent and stop supporting those of the one percent. In Los Angeles, for example, the same night the city council voted to endorse Occupy LA, it also reaffirmed its support for a “Responsible Banking Initiative,” which would leverage the city’s over $25 billion in pension and cash investments to pressure banks to invest in the city. Moving city funds to non-profit development banks is also being discussed.

In Brooklyn, Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez proposed a millionaire’s tax to raise $4 billion to prevent the cutting of vital social services. Absent such a tax, he proposed a $4 billion fund to be voluntarily contributed by 400 companies in the financial sector each contributing five to ten million dollars for three years to create jobs, fix infrastructure, and build affordable housing. He did not say how the companies would be persuaded to contribute, but his proposal was made at the start of a march from the Brooklyn Borough Hall across the Brooklyn Bridge to Wall Street.

I remember when, during the Vietnam War millions of people joined the monthly demonstrations and “work breaks” known as the Vietnam Moratorium – only to have the national leadership shut it down and move into electoral politics. Although some politicians and labor leaders have called for OWSers to campaign for Obama or the Democratic Party, such a shift is unlikely to happen to the Occupy movement. For those who want that to happen, their best strategy will be to make Obama and the Democratic Party something the Occupy movement (and the rest of the 99 percent) believe is worth supporting. Start freezing foreclosures, taxing the rich, creating new public works jobs, and housing the homeless. Build an alternative to corporate greed and they will come.

Winter Soldiers

The occupations have been incredibly successful. But nothing can fail like success. Z Magazine founder Michael Albert, just returned from conversations with protest veterans in Greece, Turkey, London, Dublin, and Spain reports he was told that their massive assemblies and occupations at first were invigorating and uplifting. “We were creating a new community. We were making new friends. We were hearing from new people.” But as days and weeks passed, “it got too familiar. And it wasn’t obvious what more they could do.”

Besides boredom (rarely a problem so far), winter is coming. I can testify just from sleeping out on one rainy night in October that, whatever the occupiers’ determination, it’s going to be tough. Some will need to create sturdier encampments better protected against the elements. Some will need to come inside.

When a threatened army successfully repositions itself it is a victory, not a defeat. What matters is that the social forces that have made OWS and its kin continue their feisty, imaginative, nonviolent reclaiming of public space by marches, occupations, and other forms of direct action without getting pinned down in positions they can’t sustain. That way they can continue their crucial role in inspiring the rest of us 99 percenters to organize ourselves.

For that, they need help right now from the rest of us 99 percenters. In New York, there is now a campaign to let the protesters stay and set up tents. Elsewhere possibilities for using indoor spaces where occupiers can “come in from the cold” (with or without official permission) are being explored. Occupiers need both material aid and political pressure from unions, religious group, and ordinary 99 percenters to make the transition to the next phase.

In 1932 at the pit of the Great Depression, labor journalist Charles R. Walker visited “Hoovervilles” and unemployed workers’ organizations around the country. He predicted:

There will be increasing outbursts of employed and unemployed alike – a kind of spontaneous democracy expressing itself in organized demonstrations by large masses of people.” They will “march or meet in order, elect their own spokesmen and committees, and work out in detail their demands for work or relief. They will present their formulated needs to factory superintendents, relief commissions, and city councils, and to the government at Washington.

What Walker called a “rough and ready democracy” is what OWS and its progeny around the country are creating today.

The unemployed councils Walker described lasted only a few years, but from them sprang the Workers Alliance, a hybrid of a trade union for workers on government public works projects and a welfare rights organization. It in turn was a crucial springboard for the industrial union movement that would transform the US economic and political system.

The Occupy movement is not unlikely to last forever, nor would it be a good thing if it did. It could be forgotten like so many movements of the past. But it instead it could be remembered as the progenitor of the 99 Percent Movement. That depends on the rest of us 99 percenters.

A Decade After 9/11, Police Departments Are Increasingly Militarized

New York magazine reported some telling figures last month on how delayed-notice search warrants -- also known as "sneak-and-peek" warrants -- have been used in recent years. Though passed with the PATRIOT Act and justified as a much-needed weapon in the war on terrorism, the sneak-and-peek was used in a terror investigation just 15 times between 2006 and 2009. In drug investigations, however, it was used more than 1,600 times during the same period.

It's a familiar storyline. In the 10 years since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has claimed a number of new policing powers in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, often at the expense of civil liberties. But once claimed, those powers are overwhelmingly used in the war on drugs. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuing militarization of America's police departments.

POLICE MILITARIZATION BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11

The trend toward a more militarized domestic police force began well before 9/11. It in fact began in the early 1980s, as the Regan administration added a new dimension of literalness to Richard Nixon's declaration of a "war on drugs." Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to national security, and once likened America's drug fight to the World War I battle of Verdun. But Reagan was more than just rhetoric. In 1981 he and a compliant Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which allowed and encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, research, and equipment. It authorized the military to train civilian police officers to use the newly available equipment, instructed the military to share drug-war–related information with civilian police and authorized the military to take an active role in preventing drugs from entering the country.

A bill passed in 1988 authorized the National Guard to aid local police in drug interdiction, a law that resulted in National Guard troops conducting drug raids on city streets and using helicopters to survey rural areas for pot farms. In 1989, President George Bush enacted a new policy creating regional task forces within the Pentagon to work with local police agencies on anti-drug efforts. Since then, a number of other bills and policies have carved out more ways for the military and domestic police to cooperate in the government's ongoing campaign to prevent Americans from getting high. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney declared in 1989, "The detection and countering of the production, trafficking and use of illegal drugs is a high priority national security mission of the Department of Defense."

The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military's job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It's dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, "Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize." That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.

Over the last several decades Congress and administrations from both parties have continued to carve holes in that law, or at least find ways around it, mostly in the name of the drug war. And while the policies noted above established new ways to involve the military in domestic policing, the much more widespread and problematic trend has been to make our domestic police departments more like the military.

The main culprit was a 1994 law authorizing the Pentagon to donate surplus military equipment to local police departments. In the 17 years since, literally millions of pieces of equipment designed for use on a foreign battlefield have been handed over for use on U.S. streets, against U.S. citizens. Another law passed in 1997 further streamlined the process. As National Journal reported in 2000, in the first three years after the 1994 law alone, the Pentagon distributed 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers, and 112 armored personnel carriers to civilian police agencies across America. Domestic police agencies also got bayonets, tanks, helicopters and even airplanes.

All of that equipment then facilitated a dramatic rise in the number and use of paramilitary police units, more commonly known as SWAT teams. Peter Kraska, a criminologist at the University of Eastern Kentucky, has been studying this trend since the early 1980s. Kraska found that by 1997, 90 percent of cities with populations of 50,000 or more had at least one SWAT team, twice as many as in the mid-1980s. The number of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 with a SWAT team increased 157 percent between 1985 and 1996.

As the number of SWAT teams multiplied, their use expanded as well. Until the 1980s, SWAT teams were used almost exclusively to defuse immediate threats to the public safety, events like hostage takings, mass shootings, escaped fugitives, or bank robberies. The proliferation of SWAT teams that began in the 1980s, along with incentives like federal anti-drug grants and asset forfeiture policies, made it lucrative to use them for drug policing. According to Kraska, by the early 1980s there were 3,000 annual SWAT deployments, by 1996 there were 30,000 and by 2001 there were 40,000. The average police department deployed its SWAT team about once a month in the early 1980s. By 1995, it was seven times a month. Kraska found that 75 to80 percent of those deployments were to serve search warrants in drug investigations.

TERROR ATTACKS BRING NEW ROUND OF MILITARIZATION

The September 11 attacks provided a new and seemingly urgent justification for further militarization of America's police departments: the need to protect the country from terrorism.

Within months of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the Office of National Drug Control Policy began laying the groundwork with a series of ads (featured most prominently during the 2002 Super Bowl) tying recreational drug use to support for terrorism. Terrorism became the new reason to arm American cops as if they were soldiers, but drug offenders would still be their primary targets.

In 2004, for example, law enforcement officials in the New York counties of Oswego and Cayuga defended their new SWAT teams as a necessary precaution in a post–September 11 world. “We’re in a new era, a new time," here,” one sheriff told the Syracuse Post Standard. “The bad guys are a little different than they used to be, so we’re just trying to keep up with the needs for today and hope we never have to use it.” The same sheriff said later in the same article that he'd use his new SWAT team “for a lot of other purposes, too ... just a multitude of other things." In 2002, the seven police officers who serve the town of Jasper, Florida -- which had all of 2,000 people and hadn’t had a murder in more than a decade -- were each given a military-grade M-16 machine gun from the Pentagon transfer program, leading one Florida paper to run the headline, “Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s.”

In 2006 alone, a Pentagon spokesman told the Worcester, Massachusetts Telegram & Gazette, the Department of Defense "distributed vehicles worth $15.4 million, aircraft worth $8.9 million, boats worth $6.7 million, weapons worth $1 million and 'other' items worth $110.6 million" to local police agencies.

In 2007, Clayton County, Georgia -- whose sheriff once complained that the drug war was being fought like Vietnam, and should instead be fought more like the D-Day invasion at Normandy -- got its own tank through the Pentagon's transfer program. Nearby Cobb County got its tank in 2008. In Richland County, South Carolina, Sheriff Leon Lott procured an M113A1 armored personnel carrier in 2008. The vehicle moves on tank-like tracks, and features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds, a type of ammunition so powerful that even the military has restrictions on how it's used on the battlefield. Lott named his vehicle "The Peacemaker." (Lott, is currently being sued for sending his SWAT team crashing into the homes of people who appeared in the same infamous photo that depicted Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Michael Phelps smoking pot in Richland County.) Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio also has a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun, though it isn't connected to his armored personnel carrier.

After 9/11, police departments in some cities, including Washington, D.C., also switched to battle dress uniforms (BDUs) instead the traditional police uniform. Critics says even subtle changes like a more militarized uniform can change both public perception of the police and how police see their own role in the community. One such critic, retired police sergeant Bill Donelly, wrote in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, "One tends to throw caution to the wind when wearing ‘commando-chic’ regalia, a bulletproof vest with the word ‘POLICE’ emblazoned on both sides, and when one is armed with high tech weaponry."

Departments in places like Indianapolis and some Chicago suburbs also began acquiring machine guns from the military in the name of fighting terror. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick actually suspended the Pentagon program in his state after the Boston Globe reported that more than 80 police departments across the state had obtained more than 1,000 pieces of military equipment. "Police in Wellfleet, a community known for stunning beaches and succulent oysters, scored three military assault rifles," the Globe reported. "At Salem State College, where recent police calls have included false fire alarms and a goat roaming the campus, school police got two M-16s. In West Springfield, police acquired even more powerful weaponry: two military-issue M-79 grenade launchers."

September 11 also brought a new source of funding for military-grade equipment in the Department of Homeland Security. In recent years, the agency has given anti-terrorism grants to police agencies across the country to purchase armored personnel carriers, including such unlikely terrorism targets as Winnebago County, Wisconsin; Longview, Texas; Tuscaloosa County, Alabama; Canyon County, Idaho; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Adrian, Michigan; and Chattanooga, Tennessee. When the Memphis suburb of Germantown, Tennessee -- which claims to be one of the safest cities in the country -- got its APC in 2006, its sheriff told the local paper that the acquisition would put the town at the "forefront" of homeland security preparedness.

In Eau Clare County, Wisconsin, government officials told the Leader Telegram that the county's new APC would mitigate "the threat of weapons or explosive devices." County board member Sue Miller added, "It’s nice, but I hope we never have to use it." But later in the same article, Police Chief Jerry Matysik says he planned to use the vehicle for other purposes, including "drug searches." It may not be necessary, Matysik said, "But because it’s available, we’ll probably use it just to be cautious."

The DHS grants are typically used to purchase the Lenco Bearcat, a modified armored personnel carrier that sells for $200,000 to $300,000. The vehicle has become something of a status symbol in some police departments, who often put out press releases with photos of the purchase, along with posing police officers clad in camouflage or battle dress uniforms.

HuffPost sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Homeland Security asking just how many grants for the vehicles have been given out since September 11, how much taxpayer money has been spent on them, and which police agencies have received them. Senior FOIA Program Specialist Angela Washington said that this information isn't available.

The post-September 11 era has also seen the role of SWAT teams and paramilitary police units expand to enforce nonviolent crimes beyond even the drug war. SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, sent into bars and fraternities suspected of allowing underage drinking, and even to enforce alcohol and occupational licensing regulations. Earlier this year, the Department of Education sent its SWAT team to the home of someone suspected of defrauding the federal student loan program.

Kraska estimates the total number of SWAT deployments per year in the U.S. may now top 60,000, or more than 160 per day. In 2008, the Maryland legislature passed a law requiring every police department in the state to issue a bi-annual report on how it uses its SWAT teams. The bill was passed in response to the mistaken and violent SWAT raid on the home of Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor Cheye Calvo, during which a SWAT team shot and killed his two black labs. The first reports showed an average of 4.5 SWAT raids per day in that state alone.

Critics like Joseph McNamara, who served as a police chief in both San Jose, California, and Kansas City, Missouri, worry that this trend, now driven by the war on terror in addition to the war on drugs, have caused police to lose sight of their role as keepers of the peace.

"Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed," McNamara wrote in a 2006 article for the Wall Street Journal. "An emphasis on 'officer safety' and paramilitary training pervades today's policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn't shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed." Noting the considerable firepower police now carry, McNamara added, "Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed."

In 2009, stimulus spending became another way to fund militarization, with police departments requesting federal cash for armored vehicles, SWAT armor, machine guns, surveillance drones, helicopters, and all manner of other tactical gear and equipment.

Like McNamara, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper finds all of this troubling. "We needed local police to play a legitimate, continuing role in furthering homeland security back in 2001," says Stamper, now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "After all, the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place on specific police beats in specific police precincts. Instead, we got a 10-year campaign of increasing militarization, constitution-abusing tactics, needless violence and heartache as the police used federal funds, equipment, and training to ramp up the drug war. It's just tragic."