Photo by FibonacciBlue. 

Once again, people have taken to the streets because a Black person has been murdered by police. This is no accident. This is the effect of 400 years of white supremacist policies and systems upheld by violence and funded by our tax dollars.

We must make difference choices. We spend billions every year to maintain our militarized, white supremacist, and colonialist policies:

• $115 billion each year to maintain a militarized police force that terrorizes Black and Brown people.
• More than $180 billion to incarcerate each succeeding generation of Black people
• More than $21 billion for detention and deportation of Black and Brown immigrants from countries where our own militaristic policies and colonialist meddling have sown violence and instability
• $6.4 trillion over the last 18 years for wars spanning 80 countries, and made politically acceptable by a deep Islamophobia.
• More than $7 billion in surplus miltiary equipment, including armored trucks, rifles, and aircraft, transfered to 8,000 police departments and law agencies in 49 states and 4 territories
• $750 billion on a military with more than 800 installations around the world, including a growing presence in Africa.

Across the nation – in Los Angeles, Oakland, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and countless other cities – police departments have budgets that dwarf those for economic development, homeless services, youth services, and alternatives to policing, just as our federal militarized budget for the Pentagon, deportations, border control, policing, and prisons dwarfs our federal budget for education, medical research, and infrastructure.

All of this comes at another cost: the cost of investing in human life and potential. We can make policy choices to address the wrongs that our policies have created for the last 400 years. We can choose to divest from militarism and reinvest in health care, education, decent housing, job protection, and we can make sure that for the first time in our history, we structure those policies to provide reparations and benefit Black people unconditionally.

More police, more weapons, and more military bases are not the answer. Sending military troops into our neighborhoods is most definitely not the answer. We must choose new answers, and build new systems to replace the racist and militarized systems that have failed us. We’ve already paid too much. 

See our fact sheets on the militarized United States of America.

 See our report on the militarized federal budget.