Monday 8 December 2014

Thank God I'm an athiest: the Warrior Cop edition

After finishing Neil Degrass Tyson's collection of essays on space, amid the fears of an upcoming race war and a hunger games style rebellion, it almost felt natural to pick up and plow through investigative journalist Radley Balko's book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" next.

It may not take 342 pages to understand that the killings of Eric Gardner, Jordan Davis, and Trayvon Martin are anything but stand-alone cases of Police misconduct. Yet Balko's book convincingly unfolds and illuminates the process and  context in which we've reached such a historical point: where armor clad SWAT teams raid people's houses in the middle of the night and treat innocent civilians as if they were insurgents wearing a suicide vest; how police stations of towns with populations smaller than 10,000 people are buying RPGs and anti-landmine Bearcat vehicles with federal grant money; or how police officers who are supposed to protect free societies are assaulting nonviolent protesters with tear gas, snipers and flash-bang grenades while dressing and acting like Robocops conducting a full-out raid on Taliban HQ.

As I plow through countless stories of SWAT teams raiding wrong houses with impunity and of cops getting high on the rush of going SEAL team 6 on civilians however, after a certain point in the book I couldn't help but be thankful of my atheism. Because looking at how he militarization of American cops have unfolded in the last half century, I can't help but think that if all the police brutality and systematic racism we face today was all according to a divine plan, God must be looking down on Ferguson MO or Staten Island with a smile on his face and with pop corn in his mouth. Perhaps he's even jamming to heavy metal as he watches a SWAT team raid the wrong house and still shoot the family dog dead.
 
To believe that there is a higher power that intervenes in your daily life and in Superbowl games may be personally comforting in the short term, but once you apply this thought process to socio-political developments such as police militarization, it takes a lot of brain twisting and circular logic to argue that a god who lets trigger happy cops shoot unarmed black people with impunity is loving and merciful. Considering the headache I'm having from trying to imagine all the brain twisting that I'll have to do if I was a believer, I can't help but think what Ricky Gervais said in closing the 2011 Golden Globes: Thank god I'm an atheist.



While Balko's highly recommended book does not make any arguments regarding religion, the historical developments illustrated in it is making me heavily suspicious of his alleged love and tolerance. This suspicion began to unfold after reading the following story of a certain Charles Whitman, as described in the reporting of the book.

As a white clean cut ex-Marine who had a wife and enjoyed playing the piano, at a glance it may not make sense to associate Whitman with the one of the most famous mass shootings in recent American history. Yet on the morning of August 11th, 1968, Whitman carried himself to the top of the clock tower at the University of Austin, Texas. Packing a footlocker with "sandwiches, gasoline, three rifles, a sawed off shotgun, two handguns, water, and enough ammunition to last a day in the shooting range." By the time he stationed himself at the top of the clock tower he had already taken the lives of five people, which included his own wife and mother. After murdering his immediate family, Whitman left a note saying that he did it out of love, so that they would be spared from the embarrassment of what he was about to do later that day.

At about ten minutes before noon, Whitman completed his transformation from Eagle Scout, ex-marine and former alter boy to become the now infamous Texas Tower Sniper. While he picked his targets at random, his precision allowed him to use only one bullet per victim as he carried out a ninety minute shooting spree. By the time Whitman was himself shot, to quote Balko's book, "he had killed thirteen people and wounded more than thirty, all from a position 230 feet from the ground."

But what set apart Whitman's killing spree from the run of the mill mass shooting was what they found out about Whitman afterwords. It turns out that months before the shooting, Whitman began experiencing violent impulses more and more frequently. Dr. Maurice Dean Heatly, the psychiatrist who had attended Whitman's therapy sessions, describes in his notes on how Whitman relayed his fantasy of "going up on the clock tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people." From one of the notes left in the clock tower, Whitman requested that his brain be studied in order to find an explanation to the violent urges he was experiencing. To quote again from Balko's book, what the doctors found was "an aggressive brain tumor growing in Whitman's hypothalamus. The tumor was compressing an area of the brain in the hypothalamus known as the amygdala, which regulates primal emotions like fear and anger."

Now, reinsert the theory of an intervening deity who has a plan for all of us like an omnipotent chess master into the equation. If god has a purpose for all of us, what did he try to accomplish when he planted that tumor in Whitman's head? Of all the people to have a murderous tumor, why did god pick an ex-marine who only needs one bullet to take down his kill? And what kind of a divine plan involves a heavily armed sniper who is controlled by a tumor induced homicidal rage? If you take god out of the equation, the tale of Charles Whitman is simply a tragedy. But when you look at the incident through the lens of a divine plan in action, the Whitman incident starts look more and more sinister than it already should.


However, the true horror of the clock tower massacre lies in its historical timing, where Whitman's shooting spree served as a catalyst for the march towards the Warrior Cops era in which we live under today.

Before the Texas Tower Sniper, the gradually rising racial tensions between the black population and the LAPD reached a boiling point with the Watts riots of 1965, which culminated into a 6 day riot where rioters clashed with 13,500 California National Guard troops under the LAPD's command. Inspector Darryl Gates, who acted as the "LAPD's point man during the riots", began to feel that his men were grossly unprepared for the chaos that the riots presented. Likening the Watts riots to the guerrilla warfare conducted in Vietnam at the time, Gates started to look to the military in order to remedy this unpreparedness.

And a month after the riots, 50 police officers exchanged gunfire with a random shooter called Jack Ray Hoxsie, in what came to be known as the Surrey Street shootout. Such incidents did not just heat up the racial tensions of the country, but it also convinced Gates to start unofficially consulting the local marines along with select members from his department. Other members included Jeff Rogers (who became leader of the first ever SWAT team) and Sgt. John Nelson, a "self taught expert in guerrilla warfare". The meetings and Gates' vision of policing that was fostered through it became the foundation of the Robocop SWAT teams of today. Effectively making Gates and his team the founding fathers of modern day SWAT teams. A vision that was further solidified as Gates started to ponder how to best respond to situations like the Texas clock tower shooting.

And as racial tensions and fears "of a black criminal class" among the public began to rise with the Watts riots and the Surrey Street shootout, the Whitman shootings served to erase the sense of safety that still lingered in white suburbia. The threat and fear of violent crime became much more real in the American psyche, where victims "were no longer urban toughs fighting among themselves."

Amid a political climate fostered by racial tensions, the rise of a counter culture, and a surge in crime rates, the timing could not have been more perfect for presidential candidate Richard Nixon to capitalize on this political climate with his tough on crime law-and-order campaign. To borrow the words of journalist Dan Baum quoted in Balko's book, Nixon wrote to his mentor Dwight Eisenhower that people don't need to experience crime itself to feel threatened by it . Nixon goes on to write that "I have found great audience response to this [law-and-order] theme in all parts of the country, including areas like New Hampshire where there is no race problem and relatively little crime."


Through his rhetorical genius, Nixon managed to pull off his campaign by uniting the protesters, the hippies, the activists and the blacks under a single banner: drugs. While the initiation of the War on Drugs would begin a few years later, the framework and the rhetoric for it was already in place. While various incidents and changes in public perception contributed to these developments, the Whitman shootings perhaps served as the biggest nudge towards of the disproportional arrests and mass incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders. Disproportionally targeting the blacks and other minorities for the next half century, as you may already know.


Now, if the clock tower shooting and the historical significance of its timing, along with Whitman's brain tumor was all according to design, what would that say about the designer? Does he have a SWAT fetish? Is he a gun nut? Does he have a traumatic experience with pot or is he just a racist on a galactic scale? And most importantly - on the off chance that god has a zealous hatred towards racial minorities - if you're a person of a racial minority who believes in god, is it really in your interest to blindly believe a designer of a shooting spree and a racist system as your lord and savior?

 
Whether all of this is by design or not, all I can say is that I don't know. But in order to believe that a god that plans everything in the world exists, you'll also have to believe that the same god planted an aggressive tumor in a sniper's head so that he can move the country towards the War on Drugs, militarized police brutality, and the disproportionate harm that has been inflicted on racial minorities as a result. If I was a omnipotent deity with a racist agenda, I couldn't think of a more psychopathic yet ingenious way to systematically subjugate racial minorities to violence.

I know that I wouldn't be changing anyone's beliefs anytime soon - although it would be awesome if I could - with this post, but I'd still like to warn the often non-white victims of police brutality in anticipation of the upcoming race war. If you're planning to protest against the injustice done to Michael Brown, Eric Gardner or Tamir Rice, please be careful. Because I have this feeling that your god is not on your side.

P.S. Thank god I'm an atheist.


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