David Helps, “The ‘Global Policeman’ Is Not Exempt From Justice: Confronting the Violence of U.S. Policing Requires an International Perspective,” in Foreign Policy (August 13, 2021)
“Wherever the United States has played “global policeman,” American police advisors have also very literally put boots on the ground. From the colonial Philippines to neocolonial Vietnam and Iraq, U.S. policymakers formed new, “modern” police forces to establish order, root out dissent, and inculcate loyalty. In the 1960s, the CIA assisted Indonesia’s security forces in an anti-Communist purge that killed approximately one million civilians. These Cold War lessons in turn inspired the militarized police tactics of the so-called War on Crime and later the War on Drugs, which locked up record numbers of disproportionately poor and Black men in struggling U.S. cities. The “global policeman” would now become the world’s top jailer, too. U.S. policing cannot be separated from U.S. military power abroad. Confronting the violence of policing—whether in Minneapolis or Manila—requires an international perspective.”
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