by Matt Stannard

Municipal and state police forces’ use of intimidating and lethal superweapons is a result of the private, for-profit production of such weapons and accompanying lobbying to create policing policies that favor those weapons. But that production and distribution couldn’t work except over a backdrop of anti-Blackness, and the ability of police ideologists to interpret disadvantaged neighborhoods and the trauma of historical oppression as Black criminality.

Racism and capitalism work together in tandem again in the training of police officers by private training firms with the same material interests as the weapons makers. The fastest way to turn police forces into consumers of those weapons is to teach cops that they need to be very, very afraid of people of color. The obvious solutions are to take control of the situation and eliminate any threat to the safety of the officer as quickly as possible. This imperative, propped up in the consciousness of police officers even if they aren’t overtly racist, must be constantly replenished.

Matt Stannard is policy director for Commonomics USA. 

Photo: By Daviskorn at English Wikipedia – Fed Up Queers, Public Domain