In the past few years, I have looked with increasing horror at the ending of Black lives in this country from an increasingly hostile and militarized police force. Since the ’70s, when Ronald Reagan asked the military to start providing local police departments with weaponry for his war on drugs, these departments have quietly been receiving weaponry designed more for the battlefield than for local community policing.
This has brought about a proliferation of swat teams, groups of police officers armed to the teeth in riot gear. It is not uncommon now to have a swat team come to your door to enforce noncriminal, regulatory laws such as raids on neighborhood poker games, barber shops for lack of barber licenses and even to execute search warrants for business fraud. (Read “The Rise of the Warrior Cop” by Radley Balko.)
Luckily for us in Seattle, those scenarios have not as yet happened here. But if the city has its way when it comes to the new police precinct, we can be assured that swat teams will become regular fixtures in our city.
A new precinct — a $149 million structure, the most expensive precinct in the country to date — is planned to be constructed in the north end. Originally slated to cost $80 million, the new improved model is nearly double that. This is due in no small part to the very latest in underground firing ranges. The range, built deep underground, has been touted to be sound-, bullet- and bomb-proof.
What is most disturbing however, will be the firing range’s capacity to include security vehicles (that’s tanks) so that our police will be able to train with assault weapons and tanks. We are told that this kind of training is needed for de-escalation purposes, but if we were really serious about resolving conflicts, we would, instead, be addressing the real causes of our problems: homelessness, joblessness and a heroin epidemic that cannot be resolved with tanks and guns.
Our laws have been clear from the very beginning: The military cannot be used for community policing, and yet this is just what is being done throughout the country and is now being offered here, to us.
I don’t have to tell you what happens to police officers when they are armed like soldiers. You already know that they begin to act like soldiers and see the community they have been sworn to protect as the enemy.
This is clearly not about crime; it’s about control. Crime here, rather petty in the scheme of things, is due, in large part, to lack of resources. We need better schools, really affordable housing, good mental health facilities and jobs that pay a living wage. Until we can address these real problems, there aren’t enough police in the country to protect us from the problems that are caused by such scarcity.
It is my understanding that Mayor Ed Murray has just placed a halt on the project. He understands the anger that is boiling up in our city against it. That does not, however, resolve the issue. What is needed is a complete abandonment of the project and for that money to be used instead to address our real problems. The old north-end precinct is still good enough.
Furthermore, many of us here see this as a line in the sand. A military-like base in our city is totally unacceptable and we will do everything possible to keep it from happening.
Cynthia Linet is an attorney, political activist and artist of “The Gun Show by Cynthia Linet” on Facebook and YouTube.