How Ferguson & Immigration are Connected: Militarized Policing
by Ryan Campbell | August 25, 2014
A #HandsupDontShoot sign at rally for Eric Garner
With thousands showing up for the Eric Garner rally on Staten Island, we can clearly see the African American community re-awakening to the outrage they felt recently during the Trayvon Martin shooting and trial, alongside a refusal to repeal Stand Your Ground legislation. The Eric Garner death has been only one of many since the last time our country was forced to confront it’s deep racial issues in law enforcement on a large scale during the public debate around Rodney King. While the African American community has faced the brunt of it, we can see the militarization of police and police brutality having an affect across all communities individually, and a detrimental affect on our nation as a whole.
Names of unarmed black men killed by police in NY
The crowd had many signs and t-shirts with their message on it, but one of them seemed to stand out: “I can’t breathe #RIPEricGarner; Hands Up Don’t Shoot #RIPMichaelBrown.” These incidents of police overreaction and brutality have not been happening in a vacuum, and several high-profile events happening mere weeks apart have roused the conscience of a nation. This has lead to Eric Holder, the top law enforcement official in the nation, going to Ferguson and sharing his story of being humiliated by a police officer.
As the eyes of a nation turned towards Ferguson, they saw officers in the type of gear to suppress riots that Americans have become increasingly accustomed to in SWAT teams, the use of which has become increasingly prevalent.
SWAT teams conduct raids, where local law enforcement takes a military approach, and have often been for very minor offenses. With increasing use of police cameras, we can watch the video of a SWAT team killing both family dogs of a man accused of marijuana possession in front of his children, and this is only one of many SWAT raids that have gone wrong.
These SWAT teams, as well as the riot police called into Ferguson, are the officers that come pouring out of an armored vehicle that looks like a tank and is built to resist the sort of weapons that would be impossible to find in the small towns that often find themselves paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for these unnecessary things: it’s a George Zimmerman fantasy that we need these weapons of war to fight the same kinds of people that our friends bought pot from in college; or to enforce a deportation order; or to force the citizens of Ferguson back into their homes when they’re peaceably assembling. If the past few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that we need to get rid of the George Zimmermans running police forces like the one in Ferguson.
Within the Latino community, we have seen law enforcement go similarly awry: harsh raids separating family are commonplace; Black Hawk helicopters and Predator drones were pushed into the Gang of 8’s “border surge;” sub-human conditions like extensive use of isolation in for-profit immigration prisons; paranoid people who believe DREAMers should be deported and our borders should be hermetically sealed with a military like Steve King (R-IA) taking prominence within the GOP; despite Asian immigrants outpacing Latinos, 97% of deportees are Latino; the recent beating/tazing death of Anastasio Rojas, who was handcuffed, laying on the ground and screaming for help, captured on a particularly shocking video as onlookers screamed for the border patrol to stop beating Rojas.
With all these concerns, the Latino community faces unique threats, but in a predictable manner like the African American community. For example, even though the police in Florida may believe my coworkers in Miami are Cuban and aren’t interested in checking their immigration status, the minute we get to Arizona, Joe Arpaio’s deputies are itching to lock them up for being brown and not having all their immigration papers with them. I wouldn’t want to bring my Latino friends to Phoenix, AZ, just like I wouldn’t want to bring my black friends to Ferguson to meet any one of the nearly all-white police officers there.
While different communities face different manifestations of police militarization and overreactions, Rojas’ screams of “ayudar” sounded a lot like the wheezes of “I can’t breathe” that were Eric Garner’s last words. In the African American community and Latino community, many of the biggest problems in policing all stem back to the perceptions of an increasingly militarized and aggressive police force, treating those who they encounter more like potentially life-threatening targets rather than members of their own community.