From Neighborhood Cops to
Robocops: The Changing Face of American
Police
By John W. Whitehead
“Technological
progress has merely provided us with
more efficient means for going
backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley,
Ends and Means
January 15, 2015 "ICH"
- If 2014 was the year of militarized
police, armored tanks, and stop-and-frisk
searches, 2015 may well be the year of
technologized police, surveillance blimps
and scan-and-frisk searches.
Just as we witnessed
neighborhood cops being transformed into
soldier cops, we’re about to see them
shapeshift once again, this time into
robocops, complete with
robotic exoskeletons,
super-vision contact lenses,
computer-linked visors, and
mind-reading helmets.
Similarly, just as
military equipment created for the
battlefield has been deployed on American
soil against American citizens, we’re about
to see military technology employed here at
home in a manner sure to annihilate what’s
left of our privacy and Fourth Amendment
rights.
For instance, with the
flick of a switch (and often without your
even being aware of the interference),
police can now
shut down your cell phone, scan your
body for “suspicious” items as you walk down
the street,
test the air in your car for alcohol vapors
as you drive down the street,
identify you at a glance and run a
background check on you for outstanding
warrants,
piggyback on your surveillance devices
to listen in on your conversations and “see”
what you see on your private cameras, and
track your car’s movements via a
GPS-enabled dart.
That doesn’t even begin to
scrape the surface of what’s coming down the
pike, with law enforcement and military
agencies boasting technologies so advanced
as to render everything up until now mere
child’s play.
Once these technologies,
which used to belong exclusively to the
realm of futuristic sci-fi films, have been
unleashed on an unsuspecting American
public, it will completely change the face
of American policing and, in the process,
transform the landscape of what we used to
call our freedoms.
It doesn’t even matter
that these technologies can be put to
beneficial uses. As we’ve learned the hard
way, once the government gets involved, it’s
only a matter of time before the harm
outweighs the benefits.
Imagine, if you will,
self-guided “smart” bullets that can
track their target as it moves,
solar-powered airships that provide
persistent wide-area surveillance and
tracking of ground “targets,” a grenade
launcher that can deliver
14 flash-bang grenade rounds,
invisible tanks that can blend into
their surroundings and masquerade as a snow
bank or a soccer mom’s station wagon, and a
guided mortar weapon that can target someone
up to 12 miles away.
Or what about “less lethal
weapons” such as the
speech jammer gun, which can render
a target tongue-tied;
sticky foam guns, which shoot foam
that hardens on contact, immobilizing the
victim; and
shock wave generators, which use the
shockwaves from a controlled explosion to
knock people over.
Now imagine trying to
defend yourself against such devices, which
are incapable of distinguishing between an
enemy combatant and a civilian. For that
matter, imagine attempting to defend
yourself or your loved ones against police
officers made superhuman thanks to
technology that renders them bullet-proof,
shatter-proof, all-seeing, all-knowing and
all-powerful.
Does rendering a
government agent superhuman make them
inhuman, as well, unable to relate to the
mass of humanity they are sworn to protect
and defend?
Pointing out that the
clothes people wear can affect how they act,
Salon magazine reporter Geordie
Mcruer notes that “when
clothing has symbolic meaning – such as a
uniform that is worn only by a certain
profession – it prepares the mind for the
pursuit of goals that are consistent with
the symbolic meaning of the clothing.”
Mcruer
continues:
When we dress our
police officers in camouflage before
deploying them to a peaceful protest,
the result will be police who think more
like soldiers. This likely includes
heightening their perception of physical
threats, and increasing the likelihood
that they react to those threats with
violence. Simply put, dressing police up
like soldiers potentially changes how
they see a situation, changing
protesters into enemy combatants, rather
than what they are: civilians exercising
their democratic rights…
When police wear
soldiers’ clothing, and hold soldiers’
weapons, it primes them to think and act
like soldiers. Furthermore, clothing
that conceals their identity – such as
the helmets, gas masks, goggles, body
armor and riot shields that are now
standard-issue for officers at peaceful
protests – will increase the likelihood
that officers react aggressively to the
situation. As a result of the fact that
they are also dressed like soldiers,
they are more likely to interpret the
situation as hostile and will more
readily identify violence as the best
solution.
While robocops are
problematic enough, the problem we’re facing
is so much greater than technology-enhanced
domestic soldiers.
As I make clear in my book
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging
American Police State, we’re on
the cusp of a major paradigm shift from
fascism disguised as a democracy into a
technocratic surveillance society in which
there are no citizens, only targets. We’re
all targets now, to be scanned, surveilled,
tracked and treated like blips on a screen.
What’s taking place in
Maryland right now is a perfect example of
this shift. With Congress’ approval and
generous funding (and without the consensus
of area residents), the
Army has just launched two massive, billion
dollar surveillance airships into the skies
over Baltimore, each airship three
times the size of a Goodyear blimp,
ostensibly to defend against cruise missile
attacks. Government officials claim the
surveillance blimps, which provide highly
detailed radar imaging within a 340-mile
radius, are not presently being used to
track individuals or carry out surveillance
against citizens, but it’s only a matter of
time before that becomes par for the course.
In New York, police will
soon start employing
mobile scanners that allow them to scan
people on the street in order to
detect any hidden objects under their
clothes, whether it be a gun, a knife or
anything else that appears “suspicious.” The
scanners will also let them carry out
enhanced data collection in the field—fingerprints,
iris scans, facial mapping—which will build
the government’s biometric database that
much faster. These scanners are a more
mobile version of the
low radiation X-ray vans used to
scan the contents of passing cars.
Google Glass, being
considered for use by officers,
would allow police to access computer
databases, as well as run background checks
on and record anyone in their line of sight.
One program,
funded by $160 million in asset forfeiture
funds, would equip police officers
and vehicles with biometric smartphones that
can scan individuals’ fingerprints and cross
check it against criminal databases. The
devices will also contain real-time
911 data, warrant information from federal,
state and city databases, photographs of
missing persons, suspects, Crime Stoppers
posters and other persons of interest, and
the latest cache of information on terror
suspects.
Stand-off lasers can detect
alcohol vapors in a moving car.
“If alcohol vapors are detected in the car,
a message with a photo of the car including
its license plate is sent to a police
officer waiting down the road. Then, the
police officer stops the car and checks for
signs of alcohol using conventional tests.”
Ekin Patrol cameras,
described as “the first truly intelligent
patrol unit in the world,” can not only
detect the speed of passing cars but can
generate tickets instantaneously, recognize
and store the license plates of stopped,
moving or parked vehicles, measure traffic
density and violation data and engage in
facial recognition of drivers and
passengers.
Collectively, all of these
gizmos, gadgets and surveillance devices
render us not just suspects in a
surveillance state but also inmates in an
electronic concentration camp. As journalist
Lynn Stuart Parramore
notes:
The Information Age …
has turned out rather differently than
many expected. Instead of information
made available for us, the key feature
seems to be information collected about
us. Rather of granting us anonymity and
privacy with which to explore a world of
facts and data, our own data is
relentlessly and continually collected
and monitored. The wondrous things that
were supposed to make our lives
easier—mobile devices, gmail, Skype,
GPS, and Facebook—have become tools to
track us, for whatever purposes the
trackers decide. We have been happily
shopping for the bars to our own
prisons, one product at a time.
Unfortunately, eager as we
are for progress and ill-suited to consider
the moral and spiritual ramifications of our
planned obsolescence, we have yet to truly
fathom what it means to live in an
environment in which we are always on red
alert, always under observation, and always
having our actions measured, judged and
found wanting under some law or other
intrusive government regulation.
There are those who are
not at all worried about this impending
future, certain that they have nothing to
hide. Rest assured, soon we will all have nowhere
to hide from the prying eyes of a government
bound and determined to not only know
everything about us—where we go, what we do,
what we say, what we read, what we keep in
our pockets, how much money we have on us,
how we spend that money, who we know, what
we eat and drink, and where we are at any
given moment—but prepared to use that
information against us, whenever it becomes
convenient and profitable to do so.
Making the case that we’re
being transformed as citizens, neighbors and
human beings, Parramore identifies
six factors arising from a society in which
surveillance becomes the norm: a
shift in power dynamics, in which the
“watcher” becomes all-seeing and
all-powerful; an incentive to turn citizens
into outlaws by criminalizing otherwise
lawful activities; diminished citizenship;
an environment of suspicion and paranoia; a
divided society comprised of the watchers
and the watched; and “a society of edgy,
unhappy beings whose sense of themselves is
chronically diminished.”
As Parramore rightly
concludes, this is “not exactly a
recipe for Utopia.”
Constitutional attorney
and author John W. Whitehead is founder and
president of The Rutherford Institute.
https://www.rutherford.org/
Copyright 2015 © The
Rutherford Institute