Police militarisation

All over the world, police officers are looking more and more like soldiers. To help us understand this militarisation, War Resisters' International has developed a new web resource. We've researched how police forces are being militarised, drawn together the various trends we can see taking place, and illustrated all of this as a new online map. You can explore the resource here: www.wri-irg.org/police

After the military coup that ended the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner in February 1989, Paraguay went through a period of social and institutional demilitarisation. This process began early in the last decade of the last century and accelerated towards the end of that decade and the start of the next, its pace set by the national political context.

In Canada, eleven indigenous Guatemalan women are in the process of taking a multinational mining company to court. The women allege that in 2007, police officers, soldiers, and private security personnel attacked their village of Lote Ocho, in eastern Guatemala, and burned dozens of homes in a bid to drive the community from their ancestral land.

As a police force, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) is unique in the way that it is organised and operates. It describes itself as an armed force.

Officers are known as ‘griffins’ because a griffin icon forms part of their logo.

The CNC was established in 2005, replacing the Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary which had been established in 1955.

Xstrata, a UK-registered company part of Glencore plc (an Anglo–Swiss commodity trading and mining company) is in court in London accused of hiring the Peruvian National Police (PNP) to oppress environmental protesters who were demonstrating against the Tintaya copper mine in a remote region of the Andes in 2012.

For decades, Kibbutz Beit Alfa has sold riot control vehicles to despotic regimes such as Pinochet’s Chile and Nkunrunziza’s Burundi.

The outright militarization of the security apparatus has infected more and more sectors of Bahraini society. In fact, it’s now been written into the country’s constitution itself.

NonLethal Technologies is a US-based company, building a variety of “less than lethal riot and crowd control equipment for military and law enforcement applications”1, and also markets weapons to be used in prisons.

In Buenaventura, right now, the way they are reacting to social protest is not just with the police. But also, according to the city's social movements, the Marine Corps, the navy and other special groups have also taken part.

When young college students in Seoul went out to march through the streets calling for Park Geun-hye’s impeachment in a long streak of demonstrations that started last October, it wasn’t difficult to bump into an acquaintance blocking you — dressed in a navy military drab armed with combat gear.

Militarism is much more than military institutions or people in uniform. The military sphere has to do with the lifestyles that people adopt, their way of seeing the world, of understanding social relationships or how effective a society can be.

The collective struggle that we are engaged in Rio intends to bring to surface the other side of the favelas. It shows people how the state threatens our culture and our lives. In 2014 and 2015, the armed forces occupied Maré.