At the Crossroads

Virginia has traffic safety stops. Police will set up a checkpoint on a random road spot and stop all traffic. Then every person must present their ID. I haven't seen this anywhere else in the US. The first time I encountered armed and uniformed men manning a road checkpoint was in Guatemala. This was in the 1980s when much of Central America was engulfed in civil wars. My brother and I had decided to hitch hike through to Panama. Military check points were common, as found on our travels through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Reactions to us two gringos varied from indifference, to suspicion, to looting us at gunpoint, and on one occasion in El Salvador rifles aimed, fingers on triggers, and the corporal ready to give the order to fire. There we had made the mistake of hitching a ride to a crossroad just a couple of miles from a battle. Unsurprisingly, it was quite an angry and edgy group of soldiers we encountered. They decided to shoot us as meddling journalists (something the El Salvador military did regularly to discourage criticism of their abysmal human rights record). Fortunately, the corporal had glanced at our British passports, and suddenly instead of ordering his men to fire he asked us about the Beatles. Coming back was bad too. My brother and I returned separately. In El Salvador he was actually arrested, beaten up, and thrown in prison. The Red Cross got him out ten days later. He was lucky, many prisoners just disappeared. I had some rough treatment by soldiers, but got back in one piece. Many years later this trip had become a memory and a story. Until we moved here to work in south western Virginia. Then one day driving to to work I encountered a checkpoint manned by armed men in uniforms - police. It was like a flashback. I was shaken to the core. I went numb and scared at the same time. The police were professional and I got through fine, but I was shaking for a long while afterwards. I still feel a strong tenseness when encountering a police checkpoint. We've seen the abuses in so many conflict zones, or under authoritarian regimes. When you give young men guns, uniforms, authority, and little accountability people get abused, beaten, robbed, tortured, raped, and killed. When police are trained and armed like soldiers then the same violent mentality develops. If they are not held accountable, if the civilians are blamed for being insufficiently obedient to the men with guns and uniforms, then the scale of power is tipped too far. When recently I was in England l saw that most of the time police were unarmed PCs walking around in pairs, and simply interacting with the people around them. Back the US they are in cars, prowling or lurking. They are increasingly heavily armed, and get ten times more hours of training with firearms than on community policing and crisis intervention combined. When one adds in the powerful veneration of the military in this country, plus the demand for strong law and order, then we see that the US is an authoritarian police state in the making. Add in voter suppression and gerrymandering at an unprecedented level, and we see that democracy is nearly dead. The best part of Central America we traveled through was Costa Rica. They didn't have an army.