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police violence
Rights Group Condemns Texas National Guard for Firing Pepper Balls at Migrants
"In separate incidents this summer, witnesses saw Texas National Guard members firing pepper-spray projectiles at migrants who posed no risk to National Guard members or anyone else."
Sep 25, 2024
Human Rights Watch on Wednesday condemned the Texas National Guard for firing pepper-spray projectiles at migrants, including women and children, who've presented no danger, citing multiple recent incidents.
"In separate incidents this summer, witnesses saw Texas National Guard members firing pepper-spray projectiles at migrants who posed no risk to National Guard members or anyone else," Bob Libal, an HRW consultant, said in a statement.
New from @HRW and me: The TX Nat'l Guard has repeatedly fired pepper spray projectiles at arriving asylum-seekers, including women & children.
#TXLege should increase oversight of TX Military Dept & deny funding requests until this practice ends. 🧵https://t.co/AuXyAGcFbO
— Bob Libal (@blibal) September 25, 2024
Pepper-spray projectiles, which are often shaped like balls, contain chemical irritants similar to pepper spray. HRW documented several instances of their use by the Texas National Guard, which polices the border as part of Operation Lone Star, a right-wing state project that has already cost more than $11 billion and drawn opposition from rights advocates.
On September 7, a Texas National Guard member in a boat fired several projectiles at a migrant who had crossed onto the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, at Eagle Pass, Texas, according to three witnesses who watched from a park in Mexico. The migrant fell down, did not get up, and didn't receive aid, they told HRW.
"I saw a National Guardsman in the boat train his gun on the man and then he pepper balled him," said Josie Rodrigues, one of the witnesses, who is a resident of Eagle Pass. "He shot him four or five times. I saw the puffs of smoke and the man went down, and he didn't get up again. It looked to me like they were aiming at the person, not around him or at his feet. It was disturbing."
On August 5, a group of migrants, including children, alleged that projectiles were fired at them, causing their eyes to burn; U.S. Border Patrol said that the Texas National Guard was in control of the area where the incident occurred, according to HRW.
The Texas National Guard also fired pepper balls at a Venezuelan couple and their 1-year-old daughter in May, Newsweekreported, based on video from Border Report.
International human rights law has strict rules on the use of force—even sublethal force, as the projectiles are designed to be—by law enforcement.
"Chemical irritants should only be deployed where a law enforcement official has reason to believe there is an imminent threat of injury," according to United Nations' guidance.
HRW is calling for the state Legislature to deny additional funding to the Texas Military Department, which oversees the state's National Guard, until the use of projectiles against migrants ends. The funding was on the agenda at a budget meeting on Wednesday.
"The Texas Legislature should respond by increasing its oversight over the Texas Military Department and denying funding increases to the department until these abuses stop," Lidal said.
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The Criminalization of Tyreek Hill
The detainment of the Miami Dolphins star is an example of what happens when society refuses to hold cops accountable for their actions—especially when violating Black people.
Sep 14, 2024
In the old 1990s Nike commercials, Mars Blackmon, played by Spike Lee, asks basketball great Michael Jordan, “Is it the shoes?”
In a much more serious, disturbing incident, Tyreek Hill, star wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, was taken down, handcuffed, kneed in the back, and manhandled by Miami-Dade police not far from the stadium where he plays.
I can guarantee you it wasn’t the shoes that got the attention of officers in a potentially deadly encounter.
It was the car, the constant criminalization of Black men, and a refusal to hold cops accountable for their actions—especially when violating Black people.
But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?
Hill, a well-paid athlete, was driving an expensive car. He’s paid his dues, sacrificed, and should be able to enjoy the fruits of his labors. He was a short distance from his Black job.
But “Driving While Black” has long been a crisis in America, and you don’t have to drive a fine car to be targeted.
“Almost every African-American or Latino can tell a story about being pulled over by the police for no apparent reason other than the color of his or her skin, especially if he or she happened to be driving in the ‘wrong place’ at the ‘wrong time’ or even driving the ‘wrong car,’” said the American Civil Liberties Union, citing cases stretching back to the 1990s.
Hill was born March 1, 1994.
“Victims of these racially motivated traffic stops rarely receive a traffic ticket or are found guilty of any violation of the law. It’s a practice called Driving While Black,” said the ACLU. “The U.S. Supreme Court established an open season on motorists in 1996 when it ruled that police could use any traffic offense as an excuse to pull a car over.” Black and White drivers engaged in illegalities “at about the same rate—28.4% in searches of Blacks and 28.8% in searches of whites.”
Yet, the ACLU noted, 41% of Black Americans say they have been stopped or detained by police because of their race and 21% of Black adults, including 30% of Black men, reported being victims of police violence.
Hill came before microphones September 8 saying he did nothing wrong and was confused about what happened and why. He calmly explained how his mother taught him to be respectful and cooperative, how he wanted to be a police officer and respected them. There are bad apples everywhere, he continued. But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?
Death.
“If Dexter Reed had not been stopped by Chicago police, he would still be with us,” Laura Washington wrote earlier this year about a controversial Chicago case.
Body cam footage of his killing, which many call an execution, captured the 26-year-old Black man sitting in his SUV. Five cops in street clothes jumped out on him in a city known for often violent, deadly carjackings.
“One demanded that Reed roll down his car window. At first, Reed complied, then rolled the window back up. Officers screamed and shouted more demands. Reed started shooting,” Washington wrote. A civilian oversight body said an officer was wounded in the wrist.
“The officers fired 96 shots in 41 seconds. Reed staggered out of the car on the driver’s side and stumbled to the ground. The officers kept shooting. Three of those shots came while Reed was lying ‘motionless on the ground,’ according to Andrea Kersten of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability,” wrote Washington.
“This tragedy leaves us with so many questions. For example, the police say he was being stopped for not wearing a seat belt. How did the officers know he wasn’t wearing the belt, since his car had tinted windows? On the video, the officers, wearing street clothes, drive hard and fast, jump out, and surround Reed’s car.”
“Did Reed shoot out of terror?” she asked in a Chicago Tribune piece.
Organizing around Reed’s death has been going on in the Windy City with many outraged and demanding justice.
“Chicago police officers reported making more than a half million stops last year on the city streets, continuing to stop Black and Brown motorists at rates disproportionate to their numbers in the driving population,” the ACLU reported in 2024. “In 2023, CPD officers stopped Black drivers at a rate 3.75 times that of white drivers and stopped Latino drivers at a rate 2.73 times that of white drivers. These disparities are similar to racial disparities reported in prior years in Chicago. CPD has never explained why it disproportionately stops Black and Latino drivers.”
There are bad apples in every system. But when institutions fail to act to correct wrongs—especially with folks having guns, handcuffs, and badges—the whole system is rotten.
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How the War on Terror Helped Cause Us to Turn on Each Other
It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.
Aug 22, 2023
Blame Donald Trump and all too many of his followers, but don’t just blame him or them. Yes, he was indeed responsible for the nightmare of January 6, 2021, and, in his own fashion, for the incitement of right-wing militia (terror!) groups like the Proud Boys. (“Stand back and stand by!”) But in this country, in this century, violence has become as all-American as apple pie. In these years, it’s been violence and more violence all the way, literally in the case of the Pentagon. But let me start a little more personally.
Having lived several years in rural Maryland along the Virginia border, I’ve watched the local political landscape gain ever-deepening fault lines (as is true in the United States at large).
In election season 2020, in my enclave of largely well-educated political liberals, many with at least one public servant in the family (like my military spouse), you saw a sea of blue “Biden/Harris” signs as you drove among fields of corn and grazing cattle. However, as you approached the Virginia border, a smattering of black, white, and blue pro-police flags—like so many photographic negatives of the American flag—began popping up in response to growing protests elsewhere in the country against police brutality and violence toward communities of color. And the farther you traveled into Virginia, the more likely you were to see former President Donald Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” signs, as well as occasional Confederate flags, on houses and lawns. After President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, those Biden/Harris signs disappeared or were occasionally replaced by American flags, but the pro-police flags and MAGA signs remained, signaling an increasingly split nation.
In 2020, another parent of young children I know saw a large pro-police flag hanging from the entrance of a nearby farm and told me he suddenly thought: This is the first time I feel afraid in my own country.
Such changes in the landscape are still all too visible. A newcomer to our region might even assume that such a split between those still dreaming of a country reminiscent of the Old South, or perhaps a future Trumpland, and American democrats like me (who would generally rather ignore the existence of the first group than grasp why they came into being) was how it had always been.
America the Violent
These days, it’s anything but surprising to note that this country has become remarkably polarized. According to a recent Pew survey, 63% of Democrats view Republicans as immoral (up from 35% in 2016), while 72% of Republicans feel the same way about Democrats (up from 47% seven years ago).
In truth, there’s nothing that new about an American tendency to reduce our fellow countrymen to their political leanings. According to a 2014 Voxarticle citing sociological research, in 1960, just 5% of Republican parents said they would be against their children marrying someone who supported a different political party. By 2010, nearly half of such respondents reported that they would be displeased.
Such an atmosphere of increasing division is reflected in recent trends in gun purchases. In 2020, more firearms were sold than in any previous year on record and, in the years that followed, those sales would only increase. By now, almost 1 in 5 American households have a weapon, nearly 400 million of them, and that weaponry is only growing more deadly. In 2020, another parent of young children I know saw a large pro-police flag hanging from the entrance of a nearby farm and told me he suddenly thought: This is the first time I feel afraid in my own country. And indeed, he responded (as he never thought he would) by purchasing a gun, fearing a future militarized coup the likes of which almost arrived on January 6, 2021.
While we’ve been spending ever greater sums to hurt others, in the process we’ve hurt ourselves, in part by spending far too little to make ourselves healthier, smarter, connected by stronger roads and bridges, and climate-resilient.
Even some of our youngest citizens have caught this fever of fear and violence. At a recent neighborhood party, a young child reported that if Donald Trump were ever to go to jail, she would bake a giant orange Trump-shaped cake, cut off the head, and eat it to celebrate. I had to laugh and then, instead of saying what first came to mind—that it would feel great to do so!—I found myself piously telling her that we probably shouldn’t dream of that kind of proto-violence, even when it comes to leaders who have caused as much suffering as Trump.
Over the past two decades, however, it’s a fact that Americans have grown ever more violent, as have our police. Mass shootings are spiking, for example. And despite the government’s longstanding preoccupation with Islamist militants, over the past decade more than 75% of politically related murders in this country have been committed by far-right extremists, just like the ones tending their fields in my region who, being white, the police would never assume to be “not from here” and so, by definition, dangerously sympathetic to extremists.
America’s Forever Wars Turn Inward
How did we get to this point of violence at home?
If you held a gun to my head (no pun intended) and demanded an answer, I’d say that our decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the military invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, as well as the launching of a “Global War on Terror,” played a major role in shaping the sort of worldview that’s now become all too American.
Since those initial invasions, after all, Pentagon spending has ballooned almost beyond imagining, being now about twice the 2000 budget in inflation-controlled dollars. Meanwhile, spending on healthcare, education, job creation, and infrastructure has increased so much more slowly. And don’t forget that, in the same years, our police became ever more strikingly militarized (on which more to come). In other words, while we’ve been spending ever greater sums to hurt others, in the process we’ve hurt ourselves, in part by spending far too little to make ourselves healthier, smarter, connected by stronger roads and bridges, and climate-resilient.
What Trump’s rhetoric of violence and victimization obscures is the way increasingly militarized U.S. policies have encouraged Americans to seek out terror in one another.
Another subtler reason is that most of us don’t get what violence is until we suddenly find ourselves caught up in it. In January 1973, after all, the government ended 25 years of the draft, turning our military into an “all-volunteer” force. So many decades later, most Americans don’t know anyone who’s served in our armed forces.
This, in turn, has meant that our 21st-century war on terror, the most prolonged set of U.S. conflicts since the Vietnam era, has been handled by volunteers who experience both longer and more frequent deployments and return home to ever fewer people who have the slightest idea what they’ve been through. As a result, many Americans are now unfamiliar with what killing people professionally does to you. Most have no idea what it’s like to see a family member return from a military deployment in the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa completely changed—with a 1,000-yard stare that makes eye contact hard, a tendency to startle at loud noises, and possibly a formidable temper. For many privileged Americans fortunate not to live that life or dwell in crime-ridden neighborhoods, violence is something left to Hollywood movies until, at least, someone opens up with an automatic weapon in your local supermarket or dance hall.
No wonder it’s been so easy for Donald Trump and many others to cast blame locally rather than on the effects of the omnipresent war on terror and so many related global forces of terror that are hard to capture in political slogans. In response to his recent Justice Department election interference indictment, Trump told his supporters, “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.”
In a sense, he was right when it came to the government in this century. Until recently, when President Biden led the way in injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into growing a clean-energy economy domestically, American policies had overwhelmingly been directed at fighting unsuccessful wars abroad rather than creating job (or life) security here at home for the high-school educated men to whom Trump unfortunately appeals so strongly.
The War on Terror Comes Home
Yet what Trump’s rhetoric of violence and victimization obscures is the way increasingly militarized U.S. policies have encouraged Americans to seek out terror in one another. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, has focused on just such policies. Most notably, anthropologist Jessica Katzenstein has shown how the Pentagon’s 1033 program, begun in the 1990s, funneled startling amounts of excess military equipment (sometimes right off distant battlefields), including armored personnel carriers, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles, to thousands of federal and local law enforcement agencies, including park, campus, and school police throughout the U.S.
That program grew dramatically with the post-9/11 buildup of the military-industrial complex. Police departments applying for such donations needed to explain that they would help them in the fight against drugs or terror. Chillingly, as Katzenstein notes, if police departments don’t have an obvious use for such weaponry, equipment, and vehicles, they have to find one fast, including quelling protests or executing home searches, which have increased significantly in communities of color in these years.
Under such circumstances, it becomes easier to imagine why, according to the assessments of some combat veterans, our police can now look more heavily armored than U.S. troops in foreign war zones. Officers wearing gas masks and bulletproof vests typically showed up in Ferguson, Missouri, back in 2014 with K-9 units, pointing sniper rifles at peaceful protesters and using tear gas, stun grenades, and smoke bombs to disperse crowds in that small Midwestern city where an unarmed black teenager had been shot and killed by a police officer several days earlier. And in the years since it’s only gotten worse nationwide.
Once you introduce injustice into a system, it can be applied against anyone.
At the same time, law enforcement of all stripes adopted a new approach called “intelligence-led policing.” The massive Department of Homeland Security, formed in response to the war on terror, has also been training police from across America in counterterrorism tactics, theoretically based on preventing crime rather than responding to it.
While such a focus may sound positive, it’s helped bring the war on terror home by ensuring that the FBI and local police monitor particular ethnic, religious, and political groups—most notably, Muslim citizens and legal residents. Under far more lax standards for surveillance ushered in by laws and policies like the 2001 Patriot Act, many Muslims have been targeted without the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing. The FBI even hired Muslim Americans to act as informants in their own communities, in certain cases encouraging young men to profess their sympathy for Islamist extremist groups and acts of mass violence. In such a world, it shouldn’t be surprising that hate crimes, incidents of racial profiling, and discriminatory comments by public figures spiked in the years after 9/11 and only continue to rise.
Once you introduce injustice into a system, it can be applied against anyone. And that’s just what’s happened. Civil-rights groups have documented cases in which, for instance, the FBI used sting operations to infiltrate, surveil, and target left-wing racial-justice activists during the summer of 2020 as America erupted in protest over the police killing of another unarmed black man, George Floyd.
A lawsuit filed this summer by the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, alleges that a young Colorado police detective went undercover with a local racial justice organization and tried to enmesh one of its members in an entirely fabricated gun-running operation. In a related case, the FBI reportedly hired as an informant a convicted felon who encouraged two Black racial justice activists to assassinate the Colorado attorney general.
Now, President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security and related law enforcement agencies are focusing their surveillance more on anti-government and white supremacist groups. If terror is a hypothetical rationale for the police getting more weaponry, then anyone can manufacture it. If, on the other hand, it’s about real plans to commit acts of violence, then the overwhelming perpetrators during the Trump years were our government and the president’s right-wing extremist collaborators. In other words, you could finally say that the “terror” of the war on terror had come home to roost.
War and Nationalism
Though the start of a war may cause people to rally around their leaders, wars against something nebulous like terror or, in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s case, “Ukrainian Nazis,” tend to prove short-lived in their ability to unify. Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, for instance, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their country to avoid having to fight their Ukrainian neighbors who often constitute part of their extended families, while their president has called them “flies that we spit out of our mouths.”
As many Americans condemn Russia for its grim invasion, it’s easy to forget that for more than two decades now, others in our world have viewed our post-9/11 foreign policy in much the way we now view Russia’s—as imperialist and expansionist. After all, the U.S. invaded two countries, while using the 9/11 attacks to launch a war on terror globally that metastasized into U.S. counterterror activities in 85 nations.
This has, in fact, been the violent American century, but even less recognized here is how our war on terror helped cause us to turn on one another. It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.
If we don’t find a way to pay more attention to why this didn’t happen and just how we did so much negatively to ourselves, then a police-state mentality and its potential companion, civil war (like the ones we’ve seen in countries we sought to “democratize” by force of arms) may, in the end, become the deepest reality of an ever more polarized America. Of that, Donald Trump is but a symptom.
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