It's not about the stuff. The issue is how we use that stuff and how do we train people to use that stuff. Do we use that stuff to confront people who are protesting in a community? Do we use a sniper rifle to see closer in a crowd? That's where it breaks down.
A militarized police force facing down innocent protesters with sniper rifles and machine guns is totally unacceptable in America.
We regard the maintenance of a large standing army of mercenaries, known as the Pinkerton system, as a menace to our liberties, and we demand its abolition.
In the United States the state monopoly on the use of violence has intensified since the 1980s, and in the process, has been increasingly directed against young people, low-income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, and women.
There are now 17,000 local American police forces that are armed with rocket launchers, bazookas, heavy machine guns, all kinds of chemical sprays, in fact some of them have tanks. You now have local police departments that are equipped beyond the standard of American heavy infantry.
Every fascist state like Germany, France, or modern Poland takes away citizen's right to self-defense. Fascist Americans such as Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton want to take arms away from American society.
Everyone is now considered a potential terrorist, providing a rational for both the government and private corporations to spy on anybody, regardless of whether they have committed a crime. Surveillance is supplemented by a growing domestic army of baton-wielding police forces who are now being supplied with the latest military equipment.
It was really my experience at Standing Rock that was pretty pivotal for me because I saw how corporations were literally militarizing themselves against American citizens so that they could kind of maximize their profit margins on fossil fuels.
There is a legitimate role for the police to keep the peace, but there should be a difference between a police response and a military response.
No one made a decision to militarize the police in America. The change has come slowly, the result of a generation of politicians and public officials fanning and exploiting public fears by declaring war on abstractions like crime, drug use, and terrorism. The resulting policies have made those war metaphors increasingly real.
Imagine the National Guard being called against a group of peaceful people. How far can we get; how disgraceful can it become? It's the most disgraceful, the most wicked thing I've seen in all my years of organizing farm labor.
All of the civil rights problems during the past years have created a situation where America right now is moving toward a police state. You can't have anything otherwise. So that's your supposition.
What started happening really quickly after 9/11 and the construction of this 'War on Terror' business is that I saw all kinds of parallels between the way that was being constructed and the way that prisons had been constructed since the early 1980s.
I myself have been scrutinized by militarized police, but I know officers who actually handle themselves in a certain way that makes me feel safe.
The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom. That's a personal evaluation, of course.
What must be addressed in the most immediate sense is the threat that the emerging police state in the United States poses not to just the young protesters occupying a number of American cities, but also the threat it poses to democracy itself. This threat is being exacerbated as a result of the merging of a war-like mentality and neoliberal mode of discipline and education in which it becomes difficult to reclaim the language of obligation, social responsibility and civic engagement.
Arming domestic police forces with paramilitary weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence of a terrorist attack on US soil; they will simply find other, increasingly permissive uses for those weapons.
When only cops have guns, it's called a "police state".
What we need in our countries is a good police force with a civilian mentality and some cheap light arms, not an army that needs to maintain its power with sophisticated weapons
Arias abolished the army in Costa Rica.
