We Have Fascism at Home: Resisting Militarized Police

While we must organize against fascism at the federal level, we must not lose sight of the threat of local police and their damage to our communities.

By John Lindsay-Poland, Convergence

While many focus on the Trump administration’s predations overseas and in targeted U.S. cities, we need to understand how local police and sheriffs–even in Democratic Party controlled areas–are still militarizing our communities and adding to the federal crackdown.

In addition to $8.4 billion in Pentagon equipment grants, police have invested heavily local funds into drones, assault weapons, and “less lethal” munitions. They are learning to use this equipment in the ever expanding “cop cities” and “cop academies” being built across the country.

The paramilitary push is built upon decades of militarization that a wave of mild reforms after the George Floyd protests in 2020 failed to stop. Police budgets have risen across the country. Last year law enforcement agencies received more Pentagon surplus equipment than the previous two years combined, in the wake of a Trump executive order to “unleash” law enforcement that removed restrictions on distributing Pentagon equipment to police.

There is no national database of weapons purchased by local police, nor of police departments’ use of those weapons. But a recent weapons industry analysis estimated that police purchases of “less lethal” weapons, including rubber bullets and chemical agents, will nearly double by 2033 as a result of “the increasing institutionalization of use-of-force continuums within law enforcement agencies.”

Police claim that these weapons permit police to avoid using lethal force and call them “de-escalation tools.” Despite this, more people were killed by police in the United States in 2024 and 2025 than any year since such killings were tracked in 2013.