We’re heartbroken and outraged and like so many of you, refuse to allow the systematic killing of Black people in the United States to continue without a fight for justice. There is a lot to be outraged about: from how the politics of COVID-19 pandemic put the lives of Black and indigenous folks at risk, to how calls for release of prisoners still haven’t been met, to the fact that police brutality has taken the lives of Ahmaud Arbury, Dreasjon Reed, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Taylor McDade, and far too many others. 

What We’re Tracking: Militarized Responses to #Justice4GeorgeFloyd

When we talk about police militarization, there is still belief in the notion that if police weren’t militarized, then we wouldn’t have a problem - even within the antimilitarist community. That's not true. We need to push back on this idea and the myth of “a few bad apples in the police force.” The truth is: “regular policing” has always and continues to harass, detain, brutalize, and terrorize Black people. It’s why there are virtually never repercussions for police officers who commit murder. And the militarization of domestic policing isn’t entirely new either - in fact, the history goes back decades.

I graduated high school in the summer of 1966 in Central New York during the tail ends of the Civil Rights Movement and during the height of the U.S.-led wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. That summer, almost 400,000 men were drafted. Having lived and been raised in two orphanages and a foster home, I left New York and hitchhiked my way to California to attend the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. I was barely out of my teens when I was first arrested at the Oakland Induction Center in 1967, the same year Dr. Martin Luther King gave his Beyond Vietnam speech. While in jail I was invited by a War Resisters League West staffer to a potluck - my very first introduction to WRL.