Baltimore & Israel: A Global Gang of Colonizers

Baltimore & Israel

A Global Gang of Colonizers

From Haiti to Puerto Rico and from the Congo to Baltimore, African (Black) people suffer from colonialism. Current atrocities happening to the people of Gaza and the West Bank clearly show the colonial reality of life and death in Palestine. What we see daily in Palestine is a project to completely replace the indigenous population with a settler population. The attempt to exterminate the Palestinians is being carried through collusion between Israel, the U.S, the European Union, and all western powers. This is nothing less than a genocidal campaign to occupy Gaza, and slaughter Palestinians trapped in the world’s largest open air prison. Clearly  Palestine is a colony born of a Zionist imperialist project. What is not so clear are the ways that Zionism extends into African (Black) communities like Baltimore.

Zionism is a political movement with a racist western imperialist ideology. The Zionist movement was initiated with an 1895 pamphlet entitled Der Judenstaat written by an atheist Jew named Theodor Herzl. Herzl was a Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist and political activist, known as the father of the Zionist movement. Herzl’s objective was to obtain a land base that could be utilized as a “Jewish” state with political and economic power.  In 1897, Herzl convened the first Zionist conference in Switzerland to launch the official program of Zionism, the Basel program. By 1917, the global Zionist campaign manifested in Switzerland as the Balfour declaration, named for the British Secretary of State for foreign affairs, Arthur Balfour. This declaration designated Palestine as the place for Jewish people to escape anti-Jewish fascism rising across the European continent.  

The establishment of the Zionist colonial state in Palestine was championed by Britain after World War II. The Zionist movement co-opted Judaism and used it to justify the theft of Palestine from the Palestinians. By 1948, the occupation of Palestine by Western European Jews had become solidified with the Nakba (the great catastrophe). During the Nakba, 750,000 Palestinians were violently removed from their lands and homes. Today, large segments of Palestinians are displaced in a global diaspora (more Palestinians live in Jordan than Jordanians). Palestinians who remain are relegated to specific territories within occupied Palestine; primarily the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza Strip. These Palestinians are prisoners in their own land, living in the racist, settler colonial, murderous apartheid state of Israel.

USA & Israel: Policing the World

Sharing Police Tactics Between the U.S. and Israel

In Gaza, Palestinians are subject to over policing, constant surveillance, indiscriminate beating, incarceration, unjust killings, and unusable water. Baltimore and other U.S cities align themselves with these practices, they fund the Israeli occupation by paying Israelis to train the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). The Original Americans (Indians) are locked on reservations. They are subject to over policing, constant surveillance, indiscriminate beating, incarceration, unjust killings, and unusable water. They are directly policed by the FBI and live the legacy of millions slaughtered by this settler colony called the United States of America. Reservation is another word for Open Air Prison, Concentration Camp, Gaza or Bantu Stand. It is all the same thing.

Policing in the U.S. has a history of racial bias against the colonized people within its borders. Anti-Black racism in this country still reigns in local, state and federal institutions. Like the obscene incarceration rates of the Palestinians, the U.S. prison industrial complex incarcerates African (Black) people at over five times the rate of white people. Today, militarized state violence practiced by the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) on the people of Baltimore is the the Deadly Exchange Program, which brings together ICE, FBI, police, border control and Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), to share and promote discriminatory and repressive tactics and policies in both countries. Thousands of cops participate in security conferences and workshops with Israeli law enforcement, the IOF, and security officials in the U.S. Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state, as well as the DC Capitol police continue to travel to Israel for training. 

There is a solid partnership between the U.S. and Israeli governments to exchange methods of state violence and control over civilians including mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent. Training through the Deadly Exchange Program places Baltimore police in the hands of racist systems that have racked up human rights violations for years. Last May, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates welcomed Israeli Police and thanked them for their annual police unity tour, with the promise to “strengthen” their “partnership.” 

Elijah Cummings Youth Program

Recruiting African Youth to Zionism

Baltimore City spends $8,959,736 each year in Israeli military efforts. But exchanges between Baltimore City and Israel also happen in less overt and more insidious ways with African (Black) youth. For the past 25 years, through the Elijah Cummings Youth Program founded by former Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD), hundreds of African (Black) high school students in Baltimore travel to Tel Aviv to “bridge gaps between the Jewish and black communities” and create “open-minded future leaders.”

Since 1998, the program has funneled Baltimore youth into a two year fellowship, with the goal of strengthening the relationship between African (Black) people in Baltimore and the Baltimore Jewish community This three stage process includes “Leadership Development, The ‘Israel Experience’ (two summers inside of the occupying state of Israel), and Community Service.” 

For two summers, students are hosted by The Yemin Orde Youth Village, a youth village named after the ‘father of the Israeli Occupation Forces,’ British Major General Orde Charles Wingate. At the end of the program, students return and meet with Zionist policy makers in the U.S. capitol, Maryland State House, and Baltimore City Hall (in addition to working within nonprofits, churches and synagogues in the city). The goal is to create the next generation of Africans that think anti-Zionism is equal to antisemitism and hatred for the Jews.

October 2023 marked 25 years of the Elijah Cummings Youth Program which is being continued, posthumously. For the recognition of the 25 years of this program, Maryland’s first Black Governor, Wes Moore, gave the keynote speech for the event aligning with the general sentiments expressed following the Al-Aqsa Flood, standing with “the right of Israel to exist,” dismissing the settler colonial foundations of Israel’s existence. This, ultimately, is the purpose of the youth program, to normalize conditions of settler colonialism for unsuspecting Black youth. 

The youth program does not teach students about the 75-year colonial occupation of Palestine and Gaza, imposed by intolerant, Zionist Israeli leaders. From the Nakba to the present day, the failure to teach the students in the program what has been done to Palestine is by design, in order to support Zionist propaganda—as the only true origin story of Palestine. This propaganda is used to legitimize  the theft of land, homes, assets, and basic human rights from the Palestinian people.

Settler Colonialism and Their Victims

People often ask why African (Black) people in Baltimore or the U.S, should concern themselves with Zionism and Palestine. The fact that the police and military who oppress both the people of Palestine and the people of Baltimore are collaborating should be enough to explain why we should be concerned. More importantly, Palestine is a settler colony just like the U.S, which has uprooted the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. Both the U.S (Baltimore) and Palestine (Gaza) are lands occupied by western Europeans claiming to flee religious oppression. In both cases their intent was to exterminate the native people and take their lands as their own. Furthermore, the Palestinans are prisoners in their own land. Africans in America have been stolen from our land and held captive in a foreign land (U.S). We have the same enemy and should fight side by side to defeat colonialism, settler colonialism, neo-colonialism, Zionism, capitalism and imperialism.These enemies are the global, white supremacist, capitalist, Axis of Domination. Africans and Palestinians have the same objectives and aspirations. We all want unity, freedom, dignity and self-determination. It is imperative that Zionism is smashed, from Baltimore to Palestine.

Banner photo: Israeli police forces arrest a Palestinian protester in Jerusalem (courtesy Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)

Black Alliance for Peace Supports National Day of Action Against Police Terror

Black Alliance for Peace Supports National Day of Action Against Police Terror

Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) member organization Community Movement Builders (CMB) is calling all organizations, organizers and community members to a National Day of Action Against Police Terror on March 9, 2023.

In the wake of the brutal killings of Tyre Nichols and forest defender Manuel Tortuguita, the city of Atlanta is going full steam ahead to build what activists have dubbed “Cop City.” Atlanta officials have proposed a $90 million complex be built on 85 acres of a forest. This would only arm and deploy more police—whom we refer to as the domestic army—in African and colonized working-class and poor communities. 

CMB has been at the forefront of efforts to defeat Cop City. CMB’s analysis suggests placing Cop City in the heart of a still-majority African city is an insidious reminder of the collaborative nature of the “Black misleadership class” that serves the white capitalist minority. It also makes clear this minority is preparing for the massive use of physical, repressive power to maintain control of its internal colonies. 

Cop City has been ostensibly framed as a neutral tool for fighting crime. But there is no neutrality when confronted with the asymmetrical power of the settler-colonial state in relation to poor and working-class communities. In that relationship of power, the police are instruments of control and containment, with Cop City being a part of the growing infrastructure for increased police terror in the United States, as well as in the U.S. state of Georgia and in the city of Atlanta.

For CMB, as well as for all of BAP’s member organizations and individual members, Cop City is part of the effort by city, state and federal governments to militarize the lives of African and poor people in the United States and around the world. This local, national and international military-police structure wages war in Ukraine, sends U.S. and NATO troops to Africa, advocates military intervention in Haiti, sanctions progressive governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and threatens humankind with nuclear annihilation. 

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! LET OUR VOICES BE HEARD!

Join us in the fight against police terror. 

#StopCopCity, end the 1033 Program and end U.S. sanctions against progressive governments. We are asking everybody to organize one or more of the following actions:

• Marches

• Rallies

• Civil disobedience actions

• Direct actions

• Banner drops

• Teach-ins

• Petition drives 

In addition, we want to flood social media with the hashtag #STOPCOPCITY.

Find an action near you.

Register for BAP’s March 9 webinar, “Countering Colonial Policing in U.S. Domestic Colonies.”

Use BAP’s resources on the 1033 program to hold a teach-in.

Defeat the War on Africans in the U.S. and Around the World!

We Are an African People and We Are at War!

The State Repression of U.S. Settler Colonialism in The South: BAP ATLANTA STATEMENT

Atlanta City-Wide Alliance

The State Repression of U.S. Settler Colonialism in The South

BAP ATLANTA STATEMENT

Atlanta is historically described as “The Black Mecca” and more contemporarily referred to as “Wakanda.” The Black Alliance for Peace Atlanta (BAP-Atlanta) rejects this deception because we know that since the 90s the population of Black people in Atlanta has decreased by more than 20% due to gentrification and that Black people overwhelmingly make up the majority of the houseless population. Although we have a Black Mayor, a Black City Council, and other Black elected officials, the income inequality gap has increased as more and more Black/African people have been displaced and forced into poverty, in large part due to the policies of these Black misleaders. The Black politicians, celebrities, clergy, HBCUs, and business owners are “readily prepared to ‘sell out the interests of the overwhelmingly working class Black masses’ (Ford, 2018) for the sake of capitalist, corporate, or imperialist interests.” (Springer 2020). Instead of defunding the police, the elected officials have increased funding for racist, violent policing.

BAP-Atlanta sees that violence in the U.S. and around the world are linked. One example of that connection is the relationship between two settler colonies - the U.S. and Israel. Since 2002, exchange programs have taken place that bring together U.S. police, ICE agents, the FBI, and other law enforcement with their counterparts in Israel. In these programs, worst practices are shared to promote the militarization and occupation of the working class and poor Black and Brown communities. Founded by Robert Friedmann, Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Georgia State University, Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) is the local manifestation of the Deadly Exchange program, in which U.S. and Israeli police and Israeli military share hyper-militarized policing techniques and technology and physically travel to zionist Israel to engage in this exchange.

Atlanta participates in the 1033 program, through which the U.S. Department of Defense transfers military equipment to local state and federal law enforcement agencies. It is the critical source of the most visible, big-ticket military items being sent to local law enforcement across the country. Originally known as the 1208 Program, this program was created in 1990 for two specific reasons: to eliminate military surplus waste following the Cold War, and to assist in the hardline federal push of the “war on drugs.” From 2009 to 2018, police departments in Georgia received $43.5 million in firearms, vehicles and other gear from the military through the program. Georgia has also received more than 2,700 military rifles, night vision goggles and laser gun sights, and literally hundreds of armored vehicles, including more than two dozen mine-resistant vehicles built to fight the war on terror abroad.

The Atlanta Police Foundation is a private non-profit that allows corporations and wealthy donors to fund police terrorism in Atlanta. It supports various police programs, including Operation Shield, “a network of advanced technologies that create more efficient policing including the citywide network of surveillance cameras and license plate readers, predictive policing platform and criminal analytics software.” Through Operation Shield, police officers view footage captured by the Foundation’s privately owned cameras. When the initiative was announced in September 2011, authorities had access to about 100 public and private cameras. Today it’s nearly 12,000. The police foundation has funded these cameras to monitor and surveil Black people every second of the day. 

The foundation has also been instrumental in the effort to establish a new “Public Safety” Training Center, also known as Cop City, to be located across 150 acres of the old Atlanta Prison Farm. This training facility — larger than 85 NFL football fields combined — would include shooting ranges, spaces for militarized drills, and a mock city complete with buildings and roads to allow APD to practice urban warfare tactics, including bomb testing and tear gas deployment. At this new installation, police will learn military-like maneuvers to kill Black people and control our bodies and movements. The Cop City new training facility is yet another massive, militarized, and corporate-funded project that the police foundation is trying to prop up behind closed doors.

Black people in the United States have a colonial relationship with the larger society. It is a relationship characterized by over-policing and institutional racism. This colonial status operates in three areas: politically, economically, and socially. We are politically stunted, with our political decisions made for us due to a lack of power. We are economically disenfranchised, depending on larger society. This is maintained by a social order that designates police in our communities as occupying forces, and the rationale and objective of increased militarism is to maintain the hegemony of the Pan-European, colonial/capitalist, and patriarchal, white supremacist system. 

The South is the base of U.S. military infrastructure. It’s also where 55 percent of Black people happen to live. BAP identifies this region as a priority for collective learning, organizing, and mobilizing the power and influence of Black workers and the poor to oppose militarism, war, and imperialism.

Footnote: Atlanta Police Foundation | Technology & Innovation

Downloadable PDF version of statement

Banner photo: Map of Cop City site plan (courtesy whatnowatlanta.com)

Black Alliance for Peace Condemns FBI Attack on the African People’s Socialist Party

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) unequivocally condemns and opposes the latest domestic U.S. state repression and intimidation tactics currently being leveled against the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP).

On Friday, July 29, 2022, the FBI executed multiple raids against APSP’s Uhuru House in St. Petersburg, Florida and their Uhuru Solidarity Center in St. Louis, Missouri and the private residence of APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela also in St. Louis. The FBI employed flashbang grenades and handcuffed Yeshitela and his wife while their house was raided. The FBI claims that the raids are connected to the federal indictment of a Russian national, Aleksandr Ionov, alleging that he has been working to spread "Russian propaganda" in the United States.

BAP believes that these raids continue the history of state repression directed against Black people in the U.S. This repression now occurs under the guise of opposing “adversary” nations but regardless of how these actions are characterized, Black people still bear the brunt of surveillance and police violence. The APSP has the right to freely associate with people around the world, to hold any political beliefs it may choose, and to express them without fear of intimidation, persecution, or prosecution.

We believe this repression to be a hysterical response to the United States’ loss of legitimacy in the context of the deepening crisis of capitalism and U.S. global hegemony. The unleashing of policing and counterintelligence forces domestically and increased militarism and warmongering abroad in the name of national security are the only avenues left to the U.S. ruling class that is engulfed in an irreversible economic crisis. They represent the hallmarks of a naked fascism that the U.S. ruling class appears to be increasingly committed to in order to maintain the rule of capital. 

BAP reminds the public that the war against working class people generally, and Black, Brown, and Indigenous workers particularly, is ongoing. The masses must acknowledge and resist this reality. While it is APSP today, it will ultimately be the rest of us tomorrow. Resistance is our only option.

Given our steadfast commitment to rebuilding the broader anti-war, anti-imperialist peace movement, BAP is not intimidated and will not retreat. We are guided by the position articulated by the Black is Back Coalition, of which BAP is a proud member, that "Now is the time to throw off all hesitation, open up new forms of struggle and to launch every protest, demonstration, and anti-imperialist action - from the ballot box to the barricades - as an act to deepen the crisis of imperialism." 

The treatment of the APSP is reminiscent of McCarthyist witch hunts that targeted and criminalized workers, immigrants, and colonized people who organized domestically and internationally against capitalist imperialism. Likewise, the FBI’s actions represent COINTELPRO-like tactics employed to crush organizations and individuals fighting to protect and expand the rights of oppressed people in general, and Africans in particular.

These tactics came back forcefully in response to the 2014 uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri. FBI agents tracked the movements and monitored the individuals tied to the protests. In 2016, when the murder of Freddie Gray ignited protests in Baltimore, the FBI admitted to providing an aircraft for surveillance in the weeks following the unrest. In 2017, the FBI created the designation “Black Identity Extremist” to monitor Black movement organizers. The term was updated to “Racially Motivated Violent Extremism” in 2018. FBI surveillance was rampant going into the summer 2020 rebellions, with FBI agents attempting to infiltrate protests in Portland.

The Black population in the United States has historically stood at the forefront of resistance and condemnations of war and state repression. In this spirit, the Black Alliance for Peace reiterates the critical, moral stance against such government aggression and stands in resolute solidarity with the APSP. 

By comprehensively linking the issue of state violence and militarism, BAP will continue to concentrate its efforts on not only opposing the U.S. war agenda globally but the war and repression being waged on Black and Brown communities within U.S. borders.

In this charge, The Black Alliance for Peace says there will be "No Compromise and No Retreat!”

BAP Coordinating Committee

Photo credit: Omali Yeshitela stands in front of his St. Louis, MO home with his supporters (St. Louis Post-Dispatch}.

BAP-Atlanta Demands End to Cop City Project

For Immediate Release
Media Contact: Tunde Osazua
(404) 771-2844
outreach@blackallianceforpeace.com

Atlanta Organizations Demand End to Cop City Project
Atlanta officials to further militarize city with new police training facility

SEPTEMBER 3, 2021—Black Alliance for Peace-Atlanta condemns Cop City, a proposed police training facility on the city-owned Old Atlanta Prison Farm. That is why BAP-Atlanta joins several organizations today to protest at the site of the proposed construction, using the slogan #StopCopCity. The march and rally will take place from 6-8 p.m. starting at 25 Peachtree St SE, Atlanta, GA 30303.

Participating organizations include Community Movement Builders, Community Movement Builders Affiliate Group, Showing Up for Racial Justice, A World Without Police, The S.O.U.L, Endstate ATL, In Defense of Black Lives ATL Coalition, ATL Radical Art, Friends of the Congo, The Atlanta Homeless Union, Sol Underground, and the Sunrise Movement. 

Artist’s rendering of the aerial view of Cop City, a proposed police training facility in Atlanta, Georgia.

To put Cop City in context, Atlanta uses the 1033 program, through which the U.S. Department of Defense transfers military equipment to local state and federal law enforcement agencies. Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) is the local manifestation of the “Deadly Exchange” program, in which  U.S. and Israeli police and Israeli military share hyper-militarized policing techniques and technology and physically travel to zionist Israel to engage in this exchange.

“Police are called to colonize communities of ALL oppressed folks to carry out the standard imperialist orders, with every intent to do more harm on behalf of the state than actually serving any positive purpose,” says BAP-Atlanta member Khamansha Raphael. 

Black people in the United States have a colonial relationship with the larger society. It is a relationship characterized by institutional racism. This colonial status operates in three areas: Politically, economically and socially. We are politically stunted, with our political decisions made for us due to a lack of power. We are economically disenfranchised, depending on larger society. This is maintained by a social order that designates police in our communities as occupying forces.

In this regard, we can see how domestic and global imperialism are counterparts.

“Police are used to enforce the status quo of white power and colonial control over the lives of Black, Brown, and other oppressed groups of people,” says BAP-Atlanta member Salome Ayuak.

We can’t trust elites’ promises to abolish or defund police—policing and incarceration are big business and managed by Democrats and Republicans. Therefore, state violence has no opposition party. Communities that want to dismantle police departments will need to build the collective power to do that work themselves. This is how we can fight efforts like Cop City and defeat the war on African/Black people.

Banner photo: Police officers brutalize protesters near the CNN Center in Atlanta on May 29, 2020. (Mike Stewart/AP)

Black Alliance for Peace Demands Biden Administration Abolish 1033 Program

For Immediate Release

Media Contact:
info@blackallianceforpeace.com
(202) 643-1136

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) calls U.S. President Joe Biden’s executive order to alter the Department of Defense’s 1033 program because of his supposed commitment to racial justice an affront. The gratuitous militarization of police forces across the United States through this program has helped to turn these agencies into brutal weapons of repression. Therefore, nothing short of complete abolition of this program is acceptable.

BAP has demanded abolition of the 1033 program since BAP’s 2017 founding. It now asks the public to sign a petition (available in English and Spanish) demanding the Biden administration and Democrats commit to abolishing this racist and brutal program.

“Here in the belly of the Deep South beast, we understand the harsh and irreversible effects measures like 1033 have had and continue to have on those who languish in poverty, forced to live in shanty shacks and tenements,” according to Jaribu Hill, executive director of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights and member of BAP’s national Coordinating Committee. “Our communities are under siege and on dusty back roads, we are accosted and brutalized by the military militia known as the police.”

“Weapons of destruction are used to terrorize our people,” Hill said. “Therefore, we cannot accept band-aid solutions to institutionalized terror under the color of law.”

The National Defense Authorization Act of 1997 that then-Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) supported and President Bill Clinton (D) signed into law created the 1033 program by expanding on a previous program.

Responding to outrage about the heavily militarized police response to protests after Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, President Barack Obama enacted a policy in 2015 that appeared to limit the program, but made little difference in any department’s ability to acquire and use military weapons.

Even with the scale-back, the Obama administration managed to transfer a $459 million arsenal to police agencies.

In fact, during the Obama administration, the 1033 program expanded 24-fold (2,400%).

President Donald Trump came into office and reversed Obama’s cosmetic changes. What the Biden administration is now proposing by reversing Trump’s reversal to the Obama policy is not enough, as reverting the policy to Obama’s altered version is not justice.

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka says what is needed is “demilitarization and an end to the police occupation of colonized Black and Brown communities.”

The Biden administration and Democrats do not admit this program is the latest form of militarized repression deployed to control and contain the Black and Brown colonized and working classes of the United States. If Biden and Democrats were really committed to racial justice, they would support abolition of the 1033 program.

Photo credit: Jeff Roberson/AP

Black Alliance for Peace Condemns Trump Administration Deploying Federal Forces Into Major U.S. Cities

The repressive U.S. state's chickens have come home to roost with President Donald Trump announcing federal troops will be deployed to several U.S. cities. This comes after federal agents reportedly disappeared protesters last week off the streets of Portland, Oregon.

When we launched the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), we had stated the ruling class would eventually rely on violence and repression, as well as assault traditional liberal rights, to maintain control as the United States continued its dive into an economic and political morass.   

What we also have related in our years of work is the tactics being deployed in Portland are not new. They have been perfected by U.S. forces and repressive states trained for decades by U.S. police, military and intelligence agencies. Now, because the ruling elite increasingly see liberal democracy and the rule of law as an impediment to their minority rule, the repressive practices normally reserved for the natives of the global South and for Black and Brown communities in the metropole are being used against insurgent white dissidents in Portland—and soon coming to a community near you.

That is why we say blowback is the inevitable consequence when social forces in the United States are silent or have the luxury of not being aware of the criminality of the U.S. state abroad.

No compromise with evil and no retreat from the enemies of collective humanity are the watchwords and slogan of BAP’s campaign work. We had recently stated that we expect many more Portlands. But we also expect fierce opposition from the people, as we have already seen with thousands of people beating back federal agents into a Portland courthouse. That is why we are organizing and building alternative power.

Media contact: info@blackallianceforpeace.com

Photo credit: Nathan Howard / Getty Images

Black Alliance for Peace – Baltimore Demand End to Policing "Surge"

Immediate Release:

Black Alliance for Peace – Baltimore Demand Public Officials Reject Trump Military “Surge” for Baltimore

JANUARY 7, 2020—Baltimore City is one of 7 cities, including Detroit, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Kansas City, Memphis and Milwaukee, selected for the Trump Administration’s “Operation Relentless Pursuit” which is intended to “surge” federal, state and local resources into cities where violent [horizontal] crime rates remain high.

“This newest version of the so-called war on crime must be seen for what it is – the latest incantation of the State’s relentless war on Baltimore’s Black working class and poor and should be categorically rejected by Baltimore’s public officials,” according to BAP organizer Vanessa Beck. 

At the end of October, during the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago, President Trump announced, “In coming weeks, Attorney General Barr will announce a new crackdown on violent crime—which I think is so important—targeting gangs and drug traffickers in high crime cities and dangerous rural areas.”

In Detroit, right before the holidays, Attorney General Barr was joined by leaders of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and U.S. Marshals Service at a press conference to unveil what amounts to a new domestic military surge. 

In an op-ed written in Detroit News, Barr says,

“Operation Relentless Pursuit will surge an unparalleled amount of federal backing to Detroit and the other most dangerous cities in the United States. It will build on the Justice Department’s successful Project Safe Neighborhoods, which encouraged community-based solutions to sew violent crime. It will also complement Project Guardian and DEEP (Disruption and Early Engagement Program), agency initiatives focused on reducing gun crime and preventing mass shootings. 

With Operation Relentless Pursuit, local law enforcement will have access to state-of-the-art technology and our nation’s top federal agents, who will be tasked with investigating and taking down the most violent offenders and their criminal organizations. We’re matching our rhetoric with resources by committing significant manpower and up to $71 million in additional funding for our federal, state, and local partners.”

BAP-Baltimore demands that public officials reject this blood money. 


BAP-Baltimore is clear when we say, “Police are used to enforce the status quo of white power and colonial control over the lives of Black, Brown, and other oppressed nations of people.” 4 of the 7 targeted cities have majority Black populations – Baltimore, 62.8%; Detroit, 79.12%; Cleveland, 50.41%; and Memphis, 63.9%. Increased militarization of police departments leads to increased numbers of civilians murdered by police, in addition to the everyday terror experienced by residents in occupied communities.

Baltimore, Detroit, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Kansas City, Memphis, and Milwaukee all participate in the Department of Defense (DoD) 1033 Program. Through the 1033 Program, military equipment gets transferred to civilian law enforcement agencies. Related is the “Deadly Exchange” program, which is a massive exchange between the U.S. and Israeli police and Israeli military where hyper-militarized policing techniques and technology are shared.

The Black Alliance for Peace – Baltimore says No Compromise, No Retreat when calling for the demilitarization of local police departments. There should be no confidence in any imperialist parties or state institutions to address the horizontal violence plaguing our communities. The behavior of police departments in this state and across the U.S. shows us the role of the police is to protect private property, sectors of the middle-class community, and the ruling-class interests. Police are called to colonized communities of ALL oppressed folks to carry out the standard imperialist orders, with every intent to do more harm on behalf of the state than actually serving any positive purpose.

BAP-Baltimore intends to resist this latest assault on the human rights of the Black and Brown poor and working class.

Media contact: blackallianceforpeacebaltimore@gmail.com

Black Alliance for Peace Condemns Trump Administration Intent to Hyper-Militarize State and Local Law Enforcement

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) condemns the announcement today by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions before a gathering of the National Fraternal Order of Police (NFOP) that the administration of President Donald Trump intends to remove the restrictions on the government’s 1033 Program—transfer of deadly military grade equipment to local and state police forces.

According to BAP national organizer Ajamu Baraka, "Since President Barack Obama's administration’s so-called restrictions were merely a publicity stunt that had no measurable impact on the flow of deadly weapons going to police forces, the Trump administration’s announcement is intended to send another public message—that it intends to make war on Black and Brown people in the United States.”

Jeff Sessions claimed in Monday’s speech that the Trump administration “is rescinding restrictions from the prior administration that limited your agencies; ability to get equipment through federal programs.” However, we at BAP understand this order is meant as yet another green light for increased repression and brutality against Black and Brown working class and poor communities.

Therefore, BAP demands that an immediate halt to the racist, repressive 1033 Program and a suspension of all transfers of military grade equipment to local and state police that are currently being processed.

Furthermore, we specifically call on members of the Congressional Black Caucus (the "conscience of Congress”), and all progressive-minded congressional representatives, to take a public stand against all aspects of the 1033 Program.

The 1033 Program evolved out of the 1990 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)'s original authorization to facilitate the transfer of surplus military grade weaponry to state and local police forces as part of the federal government's so-called "War on Drugs." In the 1997 NDAA, the authorized transfer was named the 1033 program and it was expanded to include counter-terrorism. It has been largely responsible for the militarization of police forces across the nation as a result of over $5.4 billion worth of equipment being transferred to state and local police agencies.

Pressure from some members of Congress and demands from various organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement led to the Obama Administration placing some restrictions on a small class of equipment. But the flow of deadly equipment did not stop. In fact, according to the Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which oversees the transfers, the value of the equipment reaching state and local police agencies actually increased the year after the restrictions were imposed.

It is clear that this “domestic weapons supply” program was never meant only to fight drugs or terrorism, but to contain and control Black and Brown bodies victimized by the rapacious consequences of a racist, capitalist order that has rendered whole sectors of the U.S. population disposable.

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Contact: Ajamu Baraka, info@blackallianceforpeace.com

Photo credit: Jeff Roberson/AP