Police or Paramilitary Forces? The Militarization of American Law Enforcement

The following is an edited transcript of a Democracy Now! segment in which Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh discuss the militarization of America's police force. 

After a wave of raids across the country in which police in riot gear broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments and arrested protesters, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan acknowledged in an interview with the BBC that she participated in a conference call with officials from 18 cities about how to deal with the Occupy movement. As police forces violently crack down on protests across the United States and Europe, we look at the increasing influence of military technology on domestic police forces. Stephen Graham is professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K. His book is, "Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism." "Why the Occupy movement is so powerful, what it’s demonstrating, is that by occupying public spaces around the world — and particularly these extremely symbolic public spaces — it’s reasserting that the city is the foundation space for democracy," Graham says. 

Stephen Graham, welcome to Democracy Now! Could you say a little bit about what the significance of your findings in the book were regarding the Occupy movements, in the U.S. particularly?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Yes, well, the book really tries to look at the ways in which police forces are increasingly using sort of military ideas and military tactics at the domestic scale to confront particularly mobilizations in cities, such as the Occupy movements that we’re talking about here, and how those tactics and ideas and, increasingly, technologies have very close links, very big security-industrial complexes, to the moves in the military towards a really intense focus on cities and on counterinsurgency tactics in sort of war zone cities such as Baghdad and Kabul.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In a CNN article that appeared yesterday, the author talks to a police officer who reports that now the kind of equipment that’s accessible to the police includes machine guns, tasers, and also that larger and mid-sized police departments in the U.S. now have access to tanks. Can you say something about how this happened?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Well, there’s been a longstanding shift in North America and Europe towards paramilitarized policing, using helicopter-style systems, using infrared sensing, using really, really heavy militarized weaponry. That’s been longstanding, fueled by the war on drugs and other sort of explicit campaigns. But more recently, there’s been a big push since the end of the Cold War by the big defense and security and IT companies to sell things like video surveillance systems, things like geographic mapping systems, and even more recently, drone systems, that have been used in the assassination raids in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and elsewhere, as sort of a domestic policing technology. It’s basically a really big, booming market, particularly in a world where surveillance and security is being integrated into buildings, into cities, into transport systems, on the back of the war on terror.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, talk about the issue of surveillance, whether we’re talking about how the Occupy movements are being watched, surveiled, monitored. Very interesting to hear Oakland Mayor Jean Quan say on the BBC that they’re coordinating—and they are coordinating with the FBI, they’re coordinating with Homeland Security—in dealing with these movements. So, talk about the surveillance apparatus, something you know very well from Britain, and name names. What are the corporations involved?