Big money for Big Brother’s enforcement arm
by digby
Between October 25 and 28 a major urban security training event and trade expo will invade Alameda County, Calif. Urban Shield, now in its seventh year, is a marketplace of repressive ideas and technologies.
The mood on the expo floor is largely convivial and friendly, with stalls staffed by as many bored salespeople as over-enthusiastic product pushers. Alongside fearsome military technologies are everyday objects like flashlights, mobile phones and bicycles. These signs of ordinariness stand as reminders of how normal the militarization of society has come to seem.
The stated goal of Urban Shield is to improve “regional disaster response capabilities,” but rather than fostering community-focused crisis response, it presents a view of our “high-threat, high-density” cities as always, already violent spaces. This vision of urban life dehumanizes and criminalizes public assembly and nonviolent protest.
The annual event has a variety of backers, including the Department of Homeland Security and over 100 police and military agencies. It features a wide-range of corporate partners peddling their wares from Black-Ops Airsoft training guns to Safariland Group’s body armor and “less lethal” tear gas line. The past participation of governments like those of Bahrain and Israel has already come under scrutiny from journalist Max Blumenthal. This year Urban Shield will host representatives from even more countries, such as Brazil, that are currently struggling to quell popular uprisings and stabilize their international image.
The arrival of Urban Shield’s carnival of control technologies has dozens of Bay Area groups raising pointed questions: Why should their community support the market for policing techniques and technologies that have been responsible for so many deaths and injuries, like the killing of the unarmed man Oscar Grant by a public transit policeman and the police projectile assault on veteran Scott Olsen? The city council of Oakland, located in Alameda County, recently paid $1.17 million to Occupy Oakland participants for injuries suffered at the hands of police with riot control technologies.
If you read this blog you know how I feel about the militarization of the police.
This sort of thing is just gratuitous. But lucrative, I’m sure.
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