We Have Fascism at Home: Resisting Militarized Police

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.

We need to continue organizing to address local state violence and the capacity for it. Many organizers are already engaged in campaigns to hold our local leaders in blue cities and counties accountable to community needs–including the need for protection from federal assault.

The State of Police in California

Policing in California reflects many of the challenges in a wide spectrum of communities. With its Democratic supermajority, the state exemplifies how the struggle against militarized policing is not principally an anti-MAGA effort. In Oakland and Alameda County, California, where I live, the sheriff, five county supervisors and city government are all controlled by Democrats. More than most U.S. cities, Oakland has a vibrant culture of community activism and support for police accountability. But police here and across the country are heavily militarized, and they seek to arm themselves even more heavily, at a time when violent crime as reported by police is at its lowest levels in 60 years.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office is run by a woman from an immigrant family who has vowed not to collaborate with ICE. Nevertheless, it obtained approval from county supervisors to buy more than 18,000 “Pepperball” munitions, and recently won approval for $235 million in local funds to upgrade the county jail, whose population is less than half what it was in 2014. This is even as the County projects a more than $100 million annual shortfall in medical reimbursements as a result of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill. Both the Oakland Police Department and Alameda County Sheriff’s Office were already heavily militarized. 

Law enforcement’s militarization is spearheaded, in good part, by civilian officials who embrace narratives of the wealthy and of police on the need for incarceration and militarized weaponry for social control. In Alameda County, for example, a “moderate” majority of county supervisors last year gutted effective oversight of the sheriff during a last-minute amendment not subject to public comment. 

After federal agents deployed in Los Angeles and Chicago last year to kidnap and assault people, spurring widespread protests, Los Angeles PD and sheriff’s deputies in LA and state troopers in both cities followed up. They used rubber bullets, tear gas, and other weapons against protesters, journalists, legal observers, and bystanders. When progressives on the LA City Council proposed restricting these weapons’ use for crowd control, LAPD doubled down and called the weapons “de-escalation tools.” The measure lost. Its defeat reinforced the role of city government in policing popular protests against federal violence.

Similarly, the sheriff of Alameda County pledged to respond to “unrest” and not interfere with federal agents’ activities. When the county passed a measure in January for ICE-free zones on county property, one supervisor whose vote was critical to passage said, “I cannot support our deputies getting in a confrontation with ICE.” The decision and comment reflect both the potential for local control of law enforcement and its political limits in the face of ICE and the MAGA onslaught.

California state law AB481, passed in 2021, aimed to demilitarize police. Instead, transparency created by the law has facilitated our ability to watch as police become even more militarized. The state’s 58 county sheriffs alone possess more than 14,000 assault weapons, 785 drones, 136 armored vehicles, and over 19,000 scattershot munitions that disperse rubber pellets or wooden rounds in all directions upon firing, according to a compilation of sheriffs’ reports on military equipment by American Friends Service Committee. 

The above numbers don’t include weapons owned by the state’s more than 400 city police departments, California Highway Patrol, and state prison guards, or the seven county sheriffs that defy the state law by refusing to disclose the militarized weaponry they own. Nearly half California’s sheriffs have hidden most assault rifles from public oversight, through a loophole in the state law for “standard issue service weapons.” Claiming assault rifles as “standard issue” is itself a serious admission of how militarized law enforcement has become.

Armored Vehicles in Oakland

Local police and sheriff’s deputies are so militarized that National Guard troops are scarcely needed to make our communities into war-like zones. In the Bay Area, many breathed a sigh of relief in October 2025 when the White House called off a surge of federal troops in San Francisco and other area cities, though not before a federal agent fired Pepperballs into the face of a pastor participating in an interfaith vigil. 

But a few days earlier, Jac Lyons, a public defense attorney, described how Oakland PD’s BearCat armored vehicle was used on one of her clients, a 67-year-old woman working as a cashier in a convenience store. Oakland PD deployed its SWAT team for a “high-risk search warrant” because of a rumor of a slot machine in the back of the store. Dozens of officers pointed assault rifles at her head, yelling at her to get on the ground. There were no weapons found. The woman had no violent criminal past. A misdemeanor charge was ultimately dismissed. This is the normalized policing that is militarizing our communities. Lyons’ testimony was followed by 30 other community members opposing more weapons purchases.

By the time these community members spoke, the officers promoting these weapons acquisitions had left the chambers in City Hall, apparently uninterested in listening. The city’s citizen Police Commission later voted to limit Oakland PD’s equipment purchases to replacements of its existing inventory of armored vehicles and assault rifles. Whether the Oakland’s City Council will heed that recommendation remains to be seen.

A Window for Change

The window to push back on militarized policing is not entirely closed, however. A federal bill introduced by Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, would place restrictions and require more transparency on the Pentagon program for giving away military weapons to police, known as the 1033 program. 

For the last two years, community members, organizations, and experts have joined a campaign to ban “scattershot” munitions used by many police and sheriff departments, which are inherently indiscriminate. Alameda County’s sheriff has reduced the number of these dangerous munitions from over 900 in 2023 to 123 now – though it has not discontinued policies for their use. 

After organizers called out Oakland PD’s bid for millions of dollars in new militarized weaponry, the Department’s Captain Eriberto Perez-Angeles disclosed to me verbally that his department will get rid of their scattershot grenades entirely in the coming months, because, he said, “they’re dangerous.” The massive Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta focused in part on the militarized training and gear that police from near and far will bring into the forested Cop City site.

Some organizing has focused on getting transparency about militarized weapons from police and city and county governments, as California law requires. It is hard to fight something if you can’t see it. Santa Cruz activists, for example, successfully organized to force disclosure of the number of assault rifles their police department owns and uses. 

Activists in Richmond, California successfully advocated for police to amend its policy to prevent use of dangerous flashbang grenades on people in a mental health crisis, resulting in fewer uses of flashbangs last year. Though some may not consider such “less lethals” to be weapons of war, when they are used in situations calling for health care, it is a form of militarization. 

Numerous local campaigns have successfully stopped contracts with Flock Safety for pervasive street cameras that collect massive amounts of location and other personal data. Flock has notoriously facilitated data sharing with ICE and other federal agencies, while police have used them to monitor protest activity. The campaigns against Flock have led to cancellations of contracts from Mountain View, California to Flagstaff, Arizona, Denver, and at least 50 other jurisdictions.

The current Trump government has openly promoted illegal action since before it entered office, and our struggle to stop it is crucial. But some organizing still needs to focus on local power, even in “safe” blue cities and counties. Otherwise, even without a “surge” of federalized troops, armed agents nominally under local control will continue to use military weapons to back up federal outlaws and attack protesters and Black and Brown community members.