We’ve talked before about why defunding the police is good climate policy, and how deniers are all too keen to sic law enforcement on peaceful protests of just two dozen or so people. And of course there was the time that someone called the Park Police, who arrived “fully riot-geared out” to protect former Navy SEAL and then-DOI chief Ryan Zinke’s DC home from the threat of... a couple of neighbors complaining about a black Mercedes idling for hours in, somehow, three parking spaces.
While Zinke’s overreaction is amusing, it is symptomatic of a larger and more dangerous issue. For more on that, we turn to an excellent piece in Dissent magazine by Georgetown University professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò that, on the surface, may sound rather radical: Climate apartheid is the coming police violence crisis.
From the first sentence, Táíwò grounds the piece in a 2019 UN report on climate, poverty and human rights that “warned about the possibility of climate apartheid: a world in which only elites are able to access basic forms of social protection while everyone else faces the devastating effects of climate crises.”
A recent USA Today op-ed co-authored by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon similarly explains “links between climate change, health, and inequality,” with evidence of the disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic communities and quotes Desmond Tutu’s reference to climate change as “the apartheid of our times” in the Financial Times last year.
But what Táíwò does is highlight the role that police have always played as oppression’s enforcement mechanism. From the “patrols and legal systems to manage colonized populations,” to the “slave patrols [which] became the basis for modern police departments in the U.S. South,” and police used to bust up strikes in Northern cities. Táíwò writes that “businessmen had keys to special alarm boxes, which they could use to alert the police at the first sign of worker unrest.”
Moving to modernity, the drug war of the 1980s, and the fact that police budgets “tend to increase when housing prices increase, even while crime rates decline,” shows us “what we can expect under climate apartheid: policing will not be aimed at preventing climate crises from harming everyone, but instead police will be tasked with protecting elites from its downsides.”
Property and power are what police have protected through the years, and little has changed.
The dehumanizing treatment of New Orleans residents during Hurricane Katrina provides further evidence of how climatic disasters unleash white supremacy, with police “given orders to shoot looters on sight” while “white vigilantes murdered Black people they deemed criminal with near-total impunity.”
When Hurricane Sandy hit and New York City’s power went out, Goldman Sachs was protected with sandbags and police: “another resource Goldman Sachs has in case of emergency is the NYPD, which is literally on its payroll. The police force guarantees the bank a ‘virtually instantaneous police response’ in case of emergency.”
And they’re hardly the only company bankrolling police and using them for private aims, with “military weapons and tactics to protect profiteering corporations from activists who seek to avert its worst effects, as they did at Standing Rock.”
It’s not just protestors though, and it’s not in the future, as Táíwò writes. “The concentration camps on the southern border already detain climate refugees: many of those housed in detention facilities have moved from places where the crops no longer grow and water is harder and harder to come by. Rather than taking any steps to mitigate the devastation of climate change, the consistent response from the U.S. government has been to build walls and increase funding for its border guards.”
Climate apartheid is already here. What are we doing about it?
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