Is America a Police State too?

Protesters across the world are being arrested and killed daily for their anger towards their government. As we have posted before, most of these issues are ignored or not adequately covered by US media outlets. Many of the protests are becoming incredibly violent and they display that many countries around the world are in fact police states. Where does this leave America?


Violent crime in America has gone significantly down since the early 90s. However, the media tends to imply that crime rates are not improving.

As you can see from this graph, 68% of people believe that crime has been going up rather than decreasing. The only way many of these people receive news of crime rates is from the media. It's odd that most of the population believes that crime is increasing.

One thing that may be explaining peoples' misconceptions about crime is the increasing militarization of local police. According to the Justice Policy Institute, state and local spending on police went from $40 billion in 1982 to $100 billion in 2012. If crime was decreasing so steadily in America why would we need a major increase in spending?

More and more towns are seeing military grade weaponry on local police. In 1994 a law allowing the pentagon to give Cold War military weapons to local police was passed. This may explain the significant increase in police brutality. It is estimated by the US Department of Justice that between 400 and 500 innocent civilians are murdered by the police every year. The Justice Policy Institute estimates that police officers  killed 587 people in 2012 alone. So since 9/11 more people have been killed by police than were killed in the Iraq war.

In the 1980s there were over 3,000 SWAT raids per year. In 2012 there were over 12,000 SWAT raids.The police are also very quick to attack black suspects, it is estimated that a black person is killed by police once every 28 hours. On top of this, in many states it is illegal to film a police office.

So with an increase in police militarization, along with an increase in police brutality, it seems that America is secretly becoming a police state. Many people believe that crime is going up, but in reality, the true crime has been coming from the police. It is estimated that you are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist. I personally believe this stat is much higher.



Some of the information I used in this post came from this short documentary. It's very informative but also quite graphic.

Other sources:
http://www.alternet.org/more-americans-killed-police-terrorists-crime-down-why-police-aggression?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark 
 http://www.gallup.com/poll/150464/americans-believe-crime-worsening.aspx
http://www.standupamericaus.org/local-national/militarization-of-local-police-continuing-story/ 
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/americans-killed-cops-outnumber-americans-killed-iraq-war/ 
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/1-black-man-killed-every-28-hours-police-or-vigilantes-america-perpetually-war-its?page=0%2C1