“You know what’s stopping them? Kill a few. » It is September 1971. President Nixon discusses with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, the suppression of the uprising at the Attica Correctional Center, in New York. Since the events of 1968 and the racist presidential election campaign of George Wallace, “law and order” has become the uninhibited credo of the Republican Party. Moreover, Nixon continues: “Do you remember Kent State? It had quite an effect, the Kent State affair! »
Kent, Ohio. This small town of 27,000 inhabitants, whose population doubles when students arrive on campus, could have been uneventful. But it is crossed by a gaping wound which refuses to heal. It is not possible to enter the campus of Kent State University without tripping over its past and making a memorial pilgrimage at the foot of the gigantic steel sculpture by Don Drumm, pierced with a drawn hole by a bullet. The monument is made of four granite blocks. And the four short posts at the foot of the hill are topped with small stones left by visitors. Four markers to remember the students who fell on May 4, 1970 under fire from the Ohio State National Guard, while demonstrating.
The Scranton Commission, charged with investigating the events, concluded that “although the guards faced danger, it was not such as to call for deadly force.” […] This tragedy must mark the last time loaded rifles are handed to guards confronting student protesters.” This report, available online, offers a user manual of an acuity that would justify its reading today by police chiefs, political decision-makers and other university presidents.
Clearly, in 2024, this is not the case.
For Professor Robert Cohen, historian of student activism, what is new in the 21ste century is that a protest of this magnitude finds its starting point on university campuses: from opposition to the war in Iraq, to the route of pipelines or the border wall, the movements Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, women’s demonstrations were mostly held in the streets. Around the world, some posted the images and questioned the violence of police repression on campuses in Austin, New Orleans, Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Edwardsville and, near here in Dartmouth, New Hampshire. In fact, if the number of student demonstrations has tripled over the last month, the number of police interventions, explains the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), has quadrupled at the same time.
However, since the presidency of Bill Clinton, the 1033 program allows police services to benefit from transfers of military equipment from which the Pentagon is withdrawing. There we find real weapons of war: anti-mine armored vehicles, grenade launchers, M-16 assault rifles, which now equip police forces, including university police. Several studies — like the one published in 2023 in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, from the pens of Professors Stavro and Welch — confirm the link between police equipment and exacerbated violence. A patrol in an armored and heavily armed vehicle is less likely to involve local policing.
The dangerous use of these weapons in a civilian context is such that during the police repression in Ferguson, the Obama administration restricted the application of the 1033 program – a provision that the Trump administration reversed in 2017.
But there is more. The US Protest Law Tracker lists anti-protest laws. In seven years, 297 bills restricting and controlling the exercise of the right to demonstrate have been submitted in 45 states: 43 have been adopted, 28 are in the process of being adopted. The International Center for Nonprofit Law analyzes the proliferation of anti-riot laws, particularly notable since 2017, even though, as professors Jeremy Pressman and Erica Chenoweth show through their Crowd Counting Consortium, recent protest movements are overwhelmingly peaceful.
What is worrying is the vocabulary used in these texts, vague to the point of not precisely defining either the offense or the punishable conduct, evasive to the point of being able to assimilate any peaceful demonstration to a riot. For example, in several states, blocking a street or sidewalk without authorization can now lead to prison (one year in Tennessee). Multiple laws relating to critical infrastructure, which even include telephone poles, penalize demonstration offenses “near the scene” and establish “conspiracy” offenses. At the same time, laws like those passed in Oklahoma absolve a driver who drives into demonstrators if, as in Florida, the victim “likely participated” in a “riot.”
This situation therefore has implications that go beyond the subject of the current protests, no matter where one stands in this complex equation. Because violent repression calls for escalation — it’s documented. Because the escalation is exploited by supporters of law and order who target a specific category of demonstrators (we have ultimately heard little about the growth of neo-Nazi, supremacist, openly anti-Semitic rallies and demonstrations over the past year ). Because the current legal arsenal, scattered, could be mobilized behind a single ideology.
Because this drift is the concern of a number of actors around the world, who, as Anne Applebaum explains in The Atlanticfrom China to Russia, are in common with the MAGA (Make America Great Again) to discredit liberal democracy. Because the erosion of American democracy represents a means of weakening dissent at home and strengthening their geopolitical positioning internationally. It is no coincidence that Iran has repeatedly played images of police repression on American campuses in its media. Kill two birds with one stone, dissidence no longer has a model. And the model lost its rudder.
Professor of international studies at CMR-Saint Jean and essayist, Élisabeth Vallet is director of the Geopolitics Observatory of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair.