Phonesavanh Family: Swot Analysis

In the early morning of May 18th, 2014, in Habersham, Georgia, a SWAT team burst into the home where the Phonesavanh family was staying. According to the local police department, the father’s nephew had allegedly made a $50 dollar drug sale (ACLU, 14). To illuminate the darkened family room, one of the officers threw a flashbang grenade that landed in the playpen of 19-month-old “Bou Bou”, resulting in the child needing to be placed in a medically induced coma due to the holes blown into his face and chest and the third degree burns covering his body. While Bou Bou was taken out of the coma a month later, the family was left with a $1 million medical bill (Love). The ex-deputy in charge of ordering the raid based on false information was not
indicted after facing trial for three charges of civil rights violation. The Phonesavanh family has settled with Habersham county for $964,000 (Boone), but the psychological toll the botched raid has taken on the family is far more than any hospital bill. A child was horribly maimed by M16-toting police officers looking for someone suspected of a small scale drug sale. This excessive use of force used in tandem with military-grade equipment is becoming more common against lower class people of color like the Phonesavanh family. The militarization of American police, with government support through funding and a foundation of ideologies that foster militarism, exacerbates the already monumental harm of law enforcement on people of color.
In his 1961 farewell address, “[Dwight D.
Eisenhower] coined the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’ (M.I.C) in an attempt to raise the public consciousness about the undue influence of militarization in society” (Kraska, 5). This was a warning of a growing connection between the government and the military, as well as the weapon and equipment industry that supplies the latter. However, Eisenhower did not predict that this trend would be tied to the country’s new response to domestic crime that would later develop towards the end of and after the Cold War. “Why have police gone the military route? It dates to the riots of the 1960s, attacks on the police by radical groups in the 1970s, and the war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s. Then came the war on terror” (USA Today). The United States has constructed a national threat out of civilian crime, “waging war” on its citizens as if they are enemies. The use of this terminology has reinforced an already intense fear of crime and contributes to a growing gap between officer and civilian and treats the latter as malevolent on a national scale. As seen in Stephen Hill and Randall Beger’s citations of Tony Fitzpatrick and Jude McCulloch, this plan of action is attributed to a need to handle criminals that operate across national borders. Whether this need is a result of external factors (exogenous) or internal factors (endogenous) is unclear (28). Whatever the cause of this dangerous ideology, it has created an environment that
sees even the smallest of crimes as a threat to national security that need to be addressed with the use of military grade equipment. The military-industrial complex has engulfed domestic law enforcement under the guise of handling transnational criminals within the United States.
Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, defines militarism as “an ideology focused on the best means to solve problems. It is a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions that stress the use of force and threat of violence as the most appropriate and efficacious means to solve problems… Militarization is the implementation of the ideology, militarism” (Kraska, 3). Our nation’s law enforcement stresses militaristic behavior as a way to handle crime that has become interpreted as a threat to national security. In response, the number of police paramilitary units, or PPUs, is increasing: out of 548 United States law enforcement agencies responding to a survey conducted in 1997, 89.4 percent had a PPU (Kappeler, Kraska, 12). This statistic is nationwide - including police agencies with jurisdictions over small towns, not just those covering heavily-populated urban areas. In current times, almost 80% of small town agencies have a PPU, compared to only 20% in the mid-1980s had these teams. Let it be noted that the frequency of deployments of these teams has increased. “There has been more than a 1,400% increase in the total number of police paramilitary deployments, or callouts, between 1980-2000” (Kraska, 6). Police paramilitary units have become startlingly active as well as large in number, almost taking the appearance of a standing army, even in areas with relatively small populations.