In Ferguson, Missouri, protests over police aggression continue two-and-a-half months after unarmed teenager Michael  Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson. On Monday, October 13, Dr. Cornel West and other spiritual leaders were arrested. This came as no surprise to West; earlier during the protests he claimed “I came here to go to jail.” While this feels like a 1960s documentary on Martin Luther King, Jr., that spirit is exactly what is needed now. We should all take a page from West’s book and really see the police militarization and violence for what it is: a civil rights issue. Addressing it with a religious community the way leaders did a half century ago could help.

As a PBS special notes, West “is a highly regarded scholar of religion, philosophy, and African-American studies” and “an an intellectual provocateur outside of the academic world.” His combination of academia and activism, of scholarship and celebrity, profoundly impacts the different causes he joins or criticizes. As a renowned Black figure in America, West’s disappointment in President Obama has been especially jarring. Slate reported this summer that West said that Obama “posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency.” Such harsh criticism reveals the complex matrix of Obama’s approval in the Black community. That the criticism is newsworthy reveals the significance of West’s opinion in America.

The Guardian reports that the recent rally in Ferguson was meant to harken back to the Civil Rights movement, and West’s intent to be arrested solidifies that. Leaders of the Black Freedom movement frequently organized to fill the jails of segregationist towns and cities across the South. Faith played an important role. Religious networks enabled civil rights leaders to encourage and mobilize people in the fight against oppression. But in Ferguson it seems like fewer people are looking for religious guidance from faith authorities. According to the Guardian, St. Louis rapper and activist Tef Poe “took the microphone and noted that the Christian, Jewish and Muslim preachers on the stage were not the people on the street trying to protect people from the police.” The article suggests that the nonviolence espoused in the 50s and 60s may not carry as much weight as it used to.

I have already written on how an emphasis on community is significant for civil rights. It may be a loss, then, if Ferguson protesters reject any religion’s power to engage and empower a community. This isn’t to say that secularism should be removed from protest, but secular people should not dismiss religion’s ability to organize. How can religion, grounded in old beliefs and traditions, aid a progressive movement toward greater justice? West, part theologian and part activist, has an approach that helps bridge the gap that many may see between religion and social justice.

His conception of democracy includes “the prophetic commitment to justice, which is at the foundation of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, means we must fight the reasons for unjustified suffering and social misery,” as a biography on West notes. Bringing religiosity into the activist fold is important for the pressing civil rights problems of our time. As the Guardian article notes, many see this as a generational problem in which elders are being held back from action. Speaking as a young person who is largely not religious, young people who are seeking change need to respect the authority of American religiosity; we should note where democratic principles of social justice meet those of religion.

Jake Ephros

Jake Ephros is a native of Montclair, New Jersey where he volunteered for political campaigns from a young age. He studies Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy at American University and looks forward to a career built around political activism, through journalism, organizing, or the government. Contact Jake at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Dr. Cornel West’s Religious Activism is Exactly What We Need in Ferguson appeared first on Law Street.

Last month, a SWAT team in Georgia severely injured a 19-month old child with a flash-bang grenade during a drug raid. No weapons or drug charges ended up being made and the child is currently hospitalized. It is not the first time something like this has happened. A former Marine was shot 23 times after police invaded his home, and false assumptions once led to a 92-year old woman’s death. Countless stories like these reflect how police culture is being reshaped to look more like the military.

Over $4.3 billion worth of surplus equipment, which was originally designed for warfare, has been transferred to state and local police agencies, according to the Law Enforcement Support Office. Nearly $450 million of that was transferred in 2013 alone. Since the 90s, federal law has enabled state and local police departments to receive old military equipment from the Department of Defense, often for free. Agencies can apply for and request surplus military equipment on a “first-come, first-served basis.”

Created by the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act, the 1033 program encourages state and local agencies to embrace paramilitary policing methods and equipment, even for drug raids. According to the U.S. Grants Office, “All DoD excess property can be used for counter-drug and other law enforcement activities with the exception of the operation of jails.”

In 1997, Professor Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University provided substantial data and analysis in a paper titled “Militarizing Mayberry and Beyond.” His work states, “Between 1985 and 1995, the number of paramilitary units in agencies serving small jurisdictions (25,000 to 50,000 people) increased by 157 percent.” This helps illuminate the proliferation of American SWAT teams or police paramilitary units (PPUs). To find out more, I sought to interview Professor Kraska and was fortunate enough to speak with him over the phone.

“Forget causality, there was not even a correlation between the formation and the deployment of SWAT teams and the rise and fall of property and violent crimes… there’s no direct use of these teams to have any kind of impact on violent crime or property crime. It’s just not what they’re used for.”

– Professor Peter Kraska

The rationale for equipping police with military gear is generally rooted in their safety. Kraska acknowledges that paramilitary units may be useful in situations like school shootings, but he reminds us, “that’s the extreme rarity.” Instead of reacting, they are “mostly doing proactive contraband raids on people’s private residences for the purpose of collecting criminal evidence.” Kraska asserts that PPUs are not being forced to act for the safety of the community; they’re trained to, and choosing to, treat the War on Drugs as if it were actual war.

Most of the scrutiny has been placed on the Department of Defense’s 1033 program. Kraska mentions that news coverage frequently overlooks the role of other government departments in militarizing the police. For example, the Department of Homeland Security (DOHS) offers brand new equipment instead of the surplus material available from the DoD. In an episode of their video series called Fault Lines, Al Jazeera sheds light on recent American police militarization, discussing how DOHS grants for military equipment transfers total over $34 billion. The episode notes the lack of federal guidelines for these transfers, as state and local law enforcement have complete discretion in how the equipment is used.

Beyond the potential for abuse, there are deeper implications of police having military-grade weapons laying around at their disposal.

“It changes, or reinforces, the culture of the police department, and a dangerous element of police culture in a police agency, where they go from thinking of themselves as civilian police in the context of a democratically-controlled society to one where they are more like the military, more like soldiers… It provides for a cultural milieu that is antagonistic to the community.”

-Professor Peter Kraska

The political arguments should come to a halt here. Liberals and conservatives do share common sense. It’s common sense that serving warrants, conducting drug searches, and other routine tasks should never be carried out by police units designed to respond to the worst-case scenarios. The authority of the police is not augmented by militarization, it is corrupted by militarization. When our officers have complete discretion to use extreme prejudice with heavy weaponry, the result is a flash-bang grenade entering a toddler’s playpen.

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Jake Ephros (@JakeEphros)

Feature image courtesy of [Oregon Department of Transportation via Flickr]

Jake Ephros

Jake Ephros is a native of Montclair, New Jersey where he volunteered for political campaigns from a young age. He studies Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy at American University and looks forward to a career built around political activism, through journalism, organizing, or the government. Contact Jake at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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