This past week two articles
arrived in my inbox in rapid succession that have caused even my head to spin.
I often tell people that after you’ve had people confess murders to you, there’s
little they could say that could shock you. Occasionally, I am proven wrong.
Grenade Launchers for Crowd Control
I was made aware of the first
article in a blog entry from the Tampa Bay (né St. Petersburg Times). In an
entry at his site The
State You’re In, Michael Kruse grabbed my attention with this headline: “The
University of Central Florida has a grenade launcher and Florida International
University has 50 assault rifles”
It
is hardly our imagination that our cities are being militarized, an issue that
has become a topic of debate around the country. But it was news to me that the
police departments at college campuses – including the one where I work – were among
those agencies. Thinking this was either
the product of hyperbole or some kind of bad joke, I bit and followed the link
to the blog.
I
was wrong.
The
blog was based on an
article from the previous week at the Chronicle of Higher
Education. It was hardly a joke. Under the 1033 federal program, military
surplus is being transferred to law enforcement agencies around the country.
The
University of Central Florida has had its grenade launcher since 2008. Retooled
to launch tear gas canisters, the launcher has only been fired in training since
that time. When asked why the university needed this weapon of war, the chief
of campus law enforcement replied it had been obtained for “security and crowd
control.”
Of
course, the crowds in question have never really been a problem at UCF. Remember, this was the safe university for Richard Nixon on the eve of his being forced from office for high crimes and misdemeanors to come and deliver a commencement speech. About
the rowdiest this largely disengaged student body (whose empty seats in the
football stadium are currently being raffled off to all comers by the campus
credit union) ever gets is the Spirit Splash at homecoming. The only real
disorder of any magnitude on the campus generally comes from drunken townies
fighting over spaces on the campus mall to erect their tents for tailgating
parties.
The
absurdity – and the dangers - of attempting to achieve crowd control with a
grenade launcher are immediately obvious to anyone who’s ever actually seen one
of these weapons of war in action. But that is hardly the only refugee from the
killing fields to find its way to campus.
The
most popular item under the 1033 program on college campuses has been the M-16
assault rifles well known to the GIs in the steamy jungles of Vietnam and today
the most widely used weapon of its class in armed conflicts around the world. At
least 60 colleges across the country have received these weapons of war with
Arizona State University the biggest recipient with 70 such weapons. Florida
International procured 50 for its campuses while UCF has lagged behind at a
mere 23. Given the university's obsession with size and its sights set on
Arizona State as the only public university larger than UCF today, one wonders
if this does not have the makings of an intercollegiate arms race.
Rationalizing the Insanity of Militarized
Campuses
The
first question that comes to my mind is how it is that we seem to have such a surplus
in military weaponry in the first place. Why do we have so many weapons of war
that we can give them away to small cities and college campuses? Aren’t weapons
of war expensive, produced for major conflicts, exceptions to the rule and not for
everyday use?
Of
course, these arsenals were produced in a social context. A decade of
unwinnable wars in far off places like Iraq and Afghanistan have produced both
a flood of wounded warriors returning to our society as well as the weapons
they employed. In a free market fundamentalist culture, there are no
restrictions on what can be produced or sold nor any limitations on who can buy
them. And with the fundamentalist interpretations of the current SCOTUS on the
Second Amendment, the militarization of campuses – like the rest of society – appears
in retrospect to have been a foregone conclusion.
The
justifications from officials at Florida universities for this militarization reflect
the corporate mentalities which now dominate their operations. Jen Day Shaw, associate
vice president and dean of students at the University of Florida, calls the program
“a cost savings for taxpayers."
Calling the program a “force multiplier,” the chief of police at Florida
State University argued that this was a way to offset underfunding of campus
police departments: “Typically, we are not staffed at optimum levels. We are
not given budgets comparable to some large cities and municipalities, so we
need to find ways to make it reach."
In
other words, we make up for not having enough campus cops by arming the ones we have with
weapons of war. What a plan!
The
UCF police chief operates a department known for its run-ins with the public, high profile incidents
in which faculty have been publicly humiliated in traffic stops, called crack
addicts while being repeatedly bodily frisked, as well incidents in which
agents smashed the passenger window out of a student’s car when she refused to
open it. Revealing a dualistic worldview cast in the cognitive developmental
language of children, the chief explained his support for his department’s
militarization: "These bad guys have plans and are heavily armed, and law
enforcement needs to be able to keep up with them.”
Thank
goodness for the good guys, right?
But
what happens when the self-appointed good guys are not so good? Who protects us
from the protectors?
It’s Just Business, Right?
The
same day this article arrived, a second
followed on its heels that truly had me reeling.
Urban
Outfitters have received a firestorm of criticism following its production of a
sweatshirt bearing the Kent State University seal and name and dyed to resemble
blood stains. Touted as a “vintage Kent State University” sweatshirt, it was
offered for sale at $129.
It’s
hard to know if this is a case of profit-uber-alles or the product of an
educational system that no longer really teaches American history, like that of
Texas. Kent State, for those who suffer from historical amnesia or simply never learned about this, was the site of the killings of four students by national
guardsmen called in to quell demonstrations by students on that campus. The
demonstrations had arisen in opposition to an expansion of the Vietnam War to
nearby Cambodia and Laos by a Richard Nixon soon to be forced from office due
to the Watergate scandal. The governor of Ohio called in national guardsmen who
opened fire on unarmed students, killing four.
Imagine
what the good guys could have done with a grenade launcher and M16s.
The killings were immortalized by a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph by John Filo showing a 14-year-old runaway girl from Florida, Mary Ann Vecchio, kneeling over the bullet riddled body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller, one of the victims of the Kent State shootings.
Reminiscent of the wailing mother holding her dead
child in Picasso’s Guernica, this
photo seared the American conscience as the middle class saw its children lying
dead on a public college campus.
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