Reforming ICE & The Police State Is Like Punching Waves — But There's 1 Answer

New column by Lee Camp

By Lee Camp

Here in the United States we want our “law enforcement” to be killers. We want big, dumb meat heads with zero accountability and even less diplomacy. We want them to have itchy trigger fingers and the interpersonal skills of potted plants. We want them looking and acting like defensive linemen with badges, guns and daddy issues. (Not that actual defensive linemen don’t have daddy issues.)

That’s what we seem to desire here in the Land of The Free™ (and the Largest Prison State of The Free™). And apparently we have it. Maybe we’ve had it ever since the first “police departments” originated from illiterate white men with guns looking to catch escaped slaves. But, judging by the numbers in the streets, a lot of us may no longer want that style of policing. Meaning, perhaps a segment of the American populace is growing up. (Is that strange tingle I’m feeling hope?)

Hundreds of thousands of bold citizens in Minneapolis have come out to protest ICE over the past week — braving violence, pepper spray, arrest, possible assassination, and temperatures that make one’s testicles shrivel up and fall off.

But there’s something a lot of these people don’t realize and need to. In order to change ICE, we must change the system that created, funded and supported ICE.

The murders and arrests of US citizens resisting ICE’s gestapo tactics is not an aberration but rather the inevitable outcome of US imperialism. For generations our country has trekked overseas to rape and pillage. But that mentality and training does not stay overseas. It comes home. It comes home to be targeted directly at anyone who isn’t as rich as or richer than Maria Carey.

About 22% of US police and 32% of ICE agents were once in our imperial military. They learned the tactics. They learned the belief system. They learned the framework. They were effectively indoctrinated by some of the best indoctrinators the world has ever seen. Any sort of moral core or human emotion was carefully and strategically beaten out of them. And the ones who hopelessly clung to some remnant of concern for their victims didn’t decide to join domestic law enforcement when they got home. Basically those who don’t become sociopaths aren’t the ones now walking the streets as cops.

Even though only a quarter of our police and one-third of ICE are ex-military, I’ve been told by retired cops that the ex-military officers are almost always the leaders of the other men and women. Essentially the ones without PTSD quickly fall in line behind the PTSD enthusiasts.

Furthermore, many of the tactics US police and ICE use come from US military tactics. Well, that and Israel.

This might explain why the US clocks in at over 1,000 murders by police officers per year. …Wait, sorry, I meant to say almost 3,000. That’s one American murdered by police every 3 hours of every day. Those numbers don’t include the people killed by ICE and other agencies.

But the fun really reaches new highs when one combines savagery with idiocy into a cocktail straight from Lucifer’s laboratory. Applicants to US law enforcement agencies are often rejected because they’re too smart. American police departments don’t want exceedingly intelligent people in the role of hired guns. And that problem got even worse this past year when departments struggling to find enough new recruits lowered their education standards even further. Pretty soon I think they’ll hire you to be a cop if you just aren’t wearing your underwear on the outside.

Some cities also reject applicants who are too empathetic. Since the real reason US police patrol our streets is to act as the fist of the fascist state when called upon, it makes perfect sense an empathetic fist would be problematic. When you’re swinging at someone’s head, the last thing you want is for your fist to have second thoughts.

This all represents a long-term imperial infrastructure of control and oppression. As former vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka said:

“What we are witnessing in the United States today is not a series of isolated policy excesses or unfortunate ‘overreaches,’ but the maturation of a coherent architecture of repression — a national security state that fuses intelligence, policing, militarization, and ideological discipline into a single system of control.”

It’s naive to believe once our ruling sociopaths have used aggressive and dehumanizing tactics around the globe, they wouldn’t then use those same tactics on a US populace that is “out of line.” Although it seems far more shocking to the average American, murdering a protester standing up against our modern-day brownshirts is no different to the empire’s ruling class than murdering an innocent man, woman, or child in Baghdad or Damascus or Gaza.

This is why reform is not an option. One can’t reform fascism. One can only revolution it.