Month: June 2020

reprint from 2014 BGM Published 12:44 a.m. ET Aug. 28, 2014 |

(Photo: AP)

In the 1980s in South Africa, I witnessed firsthand the apartheid state’s ferocious attempt to crush rebellion in local townships and wars with neighboring states. Central to this effort was the South African Defence Force’s home-grown equipment, most notably Casspirs, armed personnel carriers designed to shelter white troops from stone-throwing students at home and roadside bombs in neighboring states. One of them crushed to death one of the most promising black graduate students I ever met there.

Almost 40 years later, I was shocked to see that one of these Casspirs, after service in South Africa and then Afghanistan, had found a new home in Broome County courtesy of the 1033 federal program that has transferred used military equipment to local law enforcement agencies all across the country. Broome County and local police have added to their equipment inventories not only the Casspir but also armored Humvees, large military trucks, night vision equipment and a wide assortment of military rifles.

These are weapons of war, not policing — and as in Ferguson, Mo., their possession inevitably triggers military responses to civil protest, which in turn only magnifies violent resistance. State officials in Missouri eventually realized this and replaced the militarized city police with state police, who quickly removed this equipment from the streets. This is a lesson being debated now around the country. It is equally hard to see where military equipment, repaired and maintained at considerable expense, has any use here. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have yet to be spotted on our streets. Equally absent are armed, infiltrating guerillas (from neighboring Canada to the north or Mexico to the south?).

More serious is the response to protest with excessive force and a warrior mentality. This is not mere speculation. Protests in Binghamton over racial harassment downtown in the last year and charges of racial profiling and brutality by individual police officers over the years, raise this prospect and draw the comparison with Ferguson ever closer. What we need, as in Ferguson, is not a militarized and isolated police force, but one that engages, interacts and is responsible to the local community.

Martin, a Johnson City resident, is longtime resident of Broome County and a professor in the sociology department at Binghamton University.

For Broome County, its been quite simple: year after year, by Republicans and Democrats alike, funding for the county sheriff has been aggressively expanded particularly for the massive jail complex.  Year after year the number of guards and the jail budget have grown.

In 2014 county legislators voted for a $7million expansion of the jail despite protests.  They built a jail and staffed it with officers to incarcerate 600 persons daily. 

Yet despite the best efforts of city and county police, district attorneys, and local judges to incarcerate as many local residents and especially as many Black men as possible, the official crime rate has been falling.  Propelled in part by growing pressure by community organizations, the number of incarcerated persons is falling. In recent months the jail has held fewer than 300 persons. It’s half empty.

And now big budget cuts are coming to the state and county. 

Here is one place to start: defund the jail.  It is a threat to public safety.

Last month only 34 persons of the 277 housed in the jail were convicted of any crime.  And for this we pay $30 million a year? 

The vast majority inside are arrested for misdemeanors.  And by all accounts a majority have been criminalized for substance use and mental health diseases.  Many more have disabilities.  Instead of treatment they get locked down and punished, and come home to us in much worse health.  And now the jail is a local hotspot for incubating the coronavirus among not just the incarcerated, but also the hundreds of guards and medical and food staff who daily move into and out of the sheriff’s complex and then into the community.

It is really quite simple:  defund the jail and use the funds for community-based and controlled health and education services that have been so severely cut by successive county administrations.