(Roughly) Daily

Police advance through a cloud of tear gas on Aug. 17, 2014 in Ferguson, Mo.

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a “War on Crime,” a declaration that ushered in a new era of American law enforcement. Johnson’s turn toward crime control as a federal priority remains his most enduring legacy—even more than the Great Society programs that scholars often herald as his greatest achievement—and continues to shape what is arguably the most important social crisis the United States now faces.

Until recently, the devastating outcomes of the War on Crime that Johnson began had gone relatively unnoticed. Then, last August, during the series of demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., images of law-enforcement authorities drawing M-4 carbine rifles and dropping tear gas bombs on protestors and civilians alike shocked much of the American public. Ferguson looked like a war zone. Many commentators attributed this sight to the ongoing technology transfers from the defense sector to local law-enforcement authorities, which began during the War on Drugs and escalated in the climate of the War on Terror.

But the source of those armored cars is much older than that. It was the Law Enforcement Assistance Act that Johnson presented to Congress on March 8, 1965, that first established a direct role for the federal government in local police operations, court systems, and state prisons. Even though the Voting Rights Act is considered the major policy victory of that year, Johnson himself hoped that 1965 would be remembered not as the apex of American liberal reform, but rather as “the year when this country began a thorough, intelligent, and effective war against crime”…

As we witness (again) the deploying of martial materiel against citizens the vast majority of whom are peacefully exercising their constitutional rights to express all-too-understandable frustration and anger, we’d be wise to try to learn from our history and correct our mistakes: “Why We Should Reconsider the War on Crime.”

(TotH to EWW)

* James Baldwin

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As we pray for ploughshares, we might recall that it was on this date in 455 that the Vandals entered Rome, which they plundered for the next two weeks.  It was, as sackings went (this was Rome’s third, of four altogether), relatively “light”:  while the Vandals (who had destroyed all of Rome’s aqueducts on their approach) looted Roman treasure and sold many Romans into slavery, their leader Genseric acceded to the pleas of Pope Leo that the Vandals refrain from the wholesale slaughter of Rome’s population and the destruction of the Eternal City’s historic buildings.

Genseric sacking Rome, by Karl Briullov

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