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lakermaker.bsky.social
Become ungovernable
@lakermaker.bsky.social
31 followers 78 following 14 posts
Agitator for liberation - landback, abolition, disability justice. Enjoys outdoor adventures and interested in Quakerism. Always reading books. Member @vetsaboutface.bsky.social
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jonathanstegall.bsky.social
Another quick quote: "This [ICE] exists today because of the prison industrial complex and the long history of warehousing Black, brown, Indigenous communities in the United States... there is no abolishing ICE without looking at [police, jails, sheriffs, etc]" @silkys13.bsky.social
February 14, 2026 at 1:15 AM
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jbenmenachem.com
What we know as "police militarization" is really a response to police being seen as ineffective in their crackdowns on Black uprisings. In other words, police were seen as insufficiently professionalized.

(excerpts from Go's "Policing Empires")
One result was the creation and spread of more tactical units, though now those units increasingly focused on crowd control. LAPD’s SWAT team, in this sense, was both new and not new. It was not new because it was just another re- serve unit like the Metropolitan Squad or Vollmer’s Crime Crushers. But it was new in that it specialized in crowd control and counterinsurgency. And to do so, it consciously emulated imperial-military forces. As Daryl Gates recounts it, the Los Angeles police had been woefully unprepared to quell the uprising in Watts in 1965. To meet future uprisings, he and his colleagues created SWAT and en- listed colonial counterinsurgency materials and modalities. They attended ses- sions on “guerilla warfare” and other tactics offered by the military at the Naval Armory in Chavez Ravine.198 As concern over urban insurgency grew in the wake of Watts and fur- ther rebellions of the decade, more and more police departments did the same thing, creating new tactical units aimed specifically at crowd control (or repurposing their existing ones). Even law enforcement agencies that had not seen uprisings created tactical units structured as counterinsurgency units, anx- iously anticipating future revolt. President Johnson’s “war on crime” helped fund the process. In 1965, the federal government gave $10 million to local police agencies. The subsequent Safe Streets Act of 1968 continued the funding with an initial budget of $63 million that expanded to $850 million by 1973.199 The im- perial boomerang thus spread beyond major cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. A related result was the retraining and retooling of entire police departments, not just elite tactical units. Up until the 1960s, police training in crowd control— or “riot control”—had been spotty and tentative. As President Johnson’s Katzenbach Crime Commission of 1965 noticed, some larger cities and po- lice agencies with tactical units had benefitted from training in crowd… The post-Watts boomerang also brought a new wave of military equip- ment, weapons, and technologies to police. The tactical units of the 1950s had emulated military forms, but they had not mobilized massive amounts of mil- itary ware. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act’s LEAA fixed this by facilitating transfers of military technologies and weaponry to local police. The shiny new tools included technologies and weaponry that had been used or developed in Vietnam. As Elizabeth Hinton explains, they included everything from surveillance and communications technologies to armored troop carriers and helicopters. In June 1966, the Los Angeles Sheriff ’s Department received $200,000 for Project Sky Knight, an air-surveillance program. Over the next four years the federal government granted helicopters to police departments in at least fifty other cities.211 Even the press took notice, reporting that local po- lice departments were acquiring “helicopters and armor-plated trucks which can be used to transport police quickly into riot areas,” “scope-equipped rifles” for countering sniper fire and other “high-powered rifles,” tear gas, armored vests, and helmets.212 Much of this equipment had been seen previously by officials as inappropriate for domestic use, but in the post-Watts era of heightened white fright and colonial fear, military equipment was seen as legitimate and indeed necessary. In the event, urban policing across the country became “increasingly militarized,” as Judith Kohler-Hausmann summarizes, “and the new firepower was aimed directly at inner-city communities.”213 While these were state-sanctioned projects that served to bring the imperial boomerang back home, more nefarious projects were also part of this wave of militarization. Beginning in the early 1970s, a Chicago police officer named Jon Burge led a group of other officers, known as the Midnight Crew, on a horrific campaign of torture at a police facility in Homan Square, Chicago. Bur…
January 24, 2026 at 6:06 PM
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margaret.bsky.social
I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.
January 22, 2026 at 3:58 AM
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crimethinc.com
Organizers in Chicago and elsewhere around the country have experienced over and over that ICE was only able to continue about its business because of local police deployed by Democrats "keeping order." Cops everywhere stand with ICE—see attachment.

crimethinc.com/Broadview2025
A screenshot of a press release from the Minnesota Fraternal Order of Police saying "FOP Stands with ICE"
January 11, 2026 at 7:24 PM