Are We Becoming a Police State?

Our title sounds alarmist and exaggerated, doesn’t it? But the uniformity of method, the rush to violence by police from New York to Oakland, from Portland to Atlanta to Los Angeles, tell us otherwise.

The Occupy movement told us something we were unsure of, after nearly half a century — that Americans would take to the streets. In 1968 it was primarily the Vietnam War. Today the self-declared 99% are angry at a distorted society that has bestowed too much on too few and left them with dim prospects.

But when they take to the streets, and mayors find reason to shut down the right of  "the people peaceably to assemble" guaranteed by the 1st Amendment, the police quickly resort to violence reminiscent of the “police riots” at the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago. Evidence of physical provocation by Occupiers are few, non-violence being key to winning public support, but the police in several cities went straight to tear gas, pepper spray and beatings.

So in New York early in the occupation, police attacked protesters and onlookers with pepper spray as seen in the video above, in which we hear women screaming from the burn of the chemical agent.

In another New York incident police used truncheons (now given the gentler name “batons” by the media) to savagely beat the crowd captured on film here. In neither case is there evidence of provocation that justified a violent response.

Ultimately New York City Mayor Bloomberg shut down Zuccotti Park telling us hygiene had suddenly become the problem it had not been for two months. Hundreds of NYPD officers in riot gear swept through the park in early morning hours, rousting campers from sleeping bags and removing and depriving protesters of the tents and gear that had become essential with the change in weather. Police sequestered credentialed reporters two blocks distant where they could not see the action. Bloomberg said this violation of a free press was to “protect the members of the press”. If that truly was the reason, it didn't sound that way when later in a speech he would say, “I have my own army in the N.Y.P.D.”

In Oakland, an Iraq vet suffered a skull fracture and brain function damage when hit by a police projectile thought to be a tear gas canister. Police classify tear gas and other crowd control aids as "non-lethal", but rubber bullets and cans fired from launchers are dangerous at close range and can indeed be lethal. A second Oakland Occupier's spleen was lacerated by a police beating such as seen in this this film clip.

At the University of California, Davis, a campus police officer walked in front of a row of student protesters sitting on the ground with locked arms, thoroughly dousing them with pepper spray, caught in this film:

In Portland, the photo below shows police hitting a young woman directly in the face with pepper spray...

Portland

...with much the same seen in Seattle...

Seattle
...where an 84-year-old woman was a victim of the chemical agent. Pepper spray is derived from the most potent in the spectrum of chili peppers (capsaicin) and causes searing pain and temporary blindness. One student reported that the burn lasted through the night — face, hands — preventing sleep — and into the next day.

In none of these instances caught on film was there any instance of provocation that merited so violent an attack.

In a massive assault, 1,400 police officers, some in riot gear, stormed the Los Angeles Occupier encampment arresting over 200.

“60 Minutes” on November 20th ran a segment on the increasing use by police of Tasers, the brand name for stun guns that shoot into the target’s body a pair of darts at the end of wires, thus closing a circuit for an agonizing electrical shock. The segment shows the unhesitatingly rapid resort to using the weapon on a motorist who is only asking what she had done that called for putting her hands on her car. The weapon has led to heart attacks and death, which, of course, the manufacturer disputes as coincidental. Police, undeterred by its violence toward fellow citizens, seem to gravitate to its use because it is an easy shortcut to bringing a civilian to heel.

These scenes, uploaded to video sites such as YouTube, show the world that the Mecca of free speech that we fashion the United States to be looks false.

The opposing view was more concerned that the protests were noisy, had inconvenienced civilian activity and might cause property damage. Occupiers were labeled unwashed “hippies” — “lice-infested, shiftless human filth” according to one offended commentator on a right wing website — a view helped along by the media's focus on the bizarre sort that street demonstrations inevitably attract. The objective is to persuade that element of society which values order above all to classify protesters as rabble rather than the jobless young people burdened by student debt who formed the core of the 99% movement. That’s the standard self-preservation tactic adopted by those who hold power to keep the public in its place in order to preserve the status quo.

The status quo may be with us for good. Glenn Greenwald, writing at Salon offers this troubling assessment:

Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time...

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.

The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free. ... As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Someone who sits at home and never protests or effectively challenges power factions will not realize that their rights of speech and assembly have been effectively eroded because they never seek to exercise those rights; it’s only when we see steadfast, courageous resistance from the likes of these UC-Davis students is this erosion of rights manifest.

David Frum, a conservative and former Bush speech writer, has more faith in the American people to rebel. He says in this New York Magazine article, an indictment of what the Republican party has become, that “If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair”.

Will the police fan the flames or subdue all change?