天空晴朗蔚蓝。灰色的塔楼矗立在通往国家的大门处，既守卫又欢迎。撞击、大火、浓烟不知从哪里冒出来，然后塔楼消失了。当尘埃和火焰最终散去，一个新的世界出现了。
死亡和毁灭定义了那个夏末的日子，并在那些经历了2001年9月11日的人的脑海中留下了烙印。从灰烬和废墟中崛起了一个新的美国:一个被伤疤重新定义、以新的战时现实为标志的社会——最近几天，原教旨主义伊斯兰统治在酝酿袭击的遥远土地上死灰复燃，这一阴影变得更加黑暗。
20年后，7000多万美国人自恐怖袭击的严峻考验后出生九一一事件遗骸。从机场安全到平民治安，再到日常生活中最不经意的部分，我们几乎不可能找到不受2001年那些恐怖时刻影响的事物。
本周，美国广播公司新闻回顾了9/11袭击并展开他们的余波，深入审视在毁灭后诞生的美国。《9/11二十年后:最长的阴影》是由乔治·斯特凡诺普洛斯讲述的五集系列纪录片。9月6日至10日，美国广播公司新闻直播将在袭击20周年纪念日之前的每晚播出剧集。该系列将在9月11日星期六的纪念仪式后全面重播。
第五部分:阴影如此之长，它覆盖了一切
蓝光可能是最奇怪的部分。
在巴尔的摩的街道上，犯罪在最贫穷的社区激增，经济绝望可能会加剧，蓝色的演员阵容让它感觉像是以机器人控制的黑暗未来为背景的科幻电影之一。
《巴尔的摩》杂志撰稿人、普利策中心受赠人乔安妮·卡瓦诺·辛普森说:“我觉得这极其压抑和反乌托邦。
蓝色的灯是用来看的。它们是安全摄像头，警方希望它们既能破案，又能震慑犯罪。在这座以美国国歌诞生地而闻名的城市里，灯光宣布人们受到监视。
批评者说，这些涂上蓝色的街区还代表着其他一些东西:自2001年9月11日恐怖分子袭击美国以来，一个过度狂热的监控国家的失败，军事化和武装到了极致。
尽管巴尔的摩市用高科技努力遏制犯罪，但该市仍然是美国凶杀率最高的城市之一。这个城市的公众形象——对许多人来说是由HBO犯罪剧《火线》塑造的——仍然与警察和社区之间令人担忧的关系息息相关。
对于巴尔的摩和其他主要大都市地区来说，无处不在的监控和警察参与杀人的悲惨循环继续推动着关于美国执法的辩论。许多最具争议的警务实践可以追溯到9/11，当时地方政府充斥着大量的资金、技术和新的打击犯罪战略——除此之外，一种新的思维模式将地方警察分配到全球反恐战争的前线。那是一个许多警察部门把自己重新塑造成准军事组织，因为他们的核心使命已经从扮演“保护和服务”的传统角色重新调整到为一个饱受恐怖和创伤的国家防止令人恐惧的“第二波”袭击。
全国各地的警察部门急于避免导致911事件的失败，争先恐后地为警察配备最新的军事装备和技术——其中大部分由联邦政府提供，而联邦政府几乎要花费20年的战争在阿富汗和伊拉克。警察部队总是渴望雇佣退伍军人，他们配备的是受过训练的人来管理占领区的人口，而不是决定他们希望如何治理的本土社区。批评者指责说，种族貌相在巴尔的摩等城市激增，在那里闪烁的蓝色灯光成为监控状态下生活的象征。
盐湖城前警察局长克里斯·伯班克(Chris Burbank)说:“过度警务，种族紧张——这对当地警务来说只是呈指数级增长。”他现在是警务公平中心的副总裁。
从巴尔的摩的空中监视到国家恐怖分子观察名单，地方警察部门在911之后的几年里尝试了新的方法来保护他们的街道。一个伤痕累累的国家基本上默许了。
随着时间的推移，这些方法的批评者说，警察森严的社区所遭受的创伤，以及居民公民自由的损失，弊大于利。随着抗议活动在2008年爆发乔治·弗洛伊德的死2020年，警察部门和他们发誓要保护的公民之间的差距似乎从未如此之大。
“警察和社区的这种分离，我认为你必须把9/11看作是浇在火上的汽油，”巴尔的摩社区活动家和作家劳伦斯·格兰普说。
在911之后，穆斯林的戒心席卷了整个国家。针对穆斯林的仇恨犯罪激增。清真寺被威胁淹没了。
罗格斯大学法学院安全、种族和权利中心主任萨哈尔·阿齐兹说:“任何表明你是阿拉伯人或穆斯林的东西都会引起所有人对你的怀疑。”。
为了应对恐怖袭击，一些主要城市的警察部门汇编了大量被指控的潜在恐怖分子的数据库，并承诺雄心勃勃的监视任务以穆斯林社区为目标。
“NYPD、LAPD和联邦调查局对你进行了大规模的监视，”阿齐兹说。“大学里的穆斯林学生组织、穆斯林拥有的企业、清真寺、穆斯林聚集的任何地方都受到系统监视……我们是活靶子。”
在袭击发生时，围绕执法部门的谈话倾向于更严格的公平警务指导方针，包括停止一些最具侵略性的策略，如拦截搜身。华盛顿多年的倡导和游说最终导致了《终止种族貌相法》，这是即将上任的小布什总统在2000年竞选时支持的一项法案。
“然后2001年，9/11发生了，它完全不在讨论范围内，”阿齐兹说。“这是不可能的。”
在2001年恐怖袭击之前，约翰·法尔默是新泽西州的司法部长，他领导了一场州警察文化的改革，该文化本身承认种族貌相，并发誓要消除这种现象。袭击发生后，法默担任了9/11委员会的高级顾问，他说他不得不关注9/11“推迟了关于种族貌相的辩论。”
“突然间，”法默说，“没人想再谈论这件事了。”
在接下来的十年里，随着美国军队在国外与恐怖分子作战，退伍军人回到家乡继续当警察。随着战争武器的涌入，美国各地的警察开始越来越像是被部署在前沿军事基地。
“自911以来，全国各地的警察部门已经获得了相当多的军用武器和装备，”曾在海外服役两次的陆军军官罗兰·克洛说。“我当地的警察部门将装备精良，可以去阿富汗的山区作战。”
这一切都是在911之后“过度监管”据许多从事执法工作的人说，这削弱了警察与社区的关系。
巴尔的摩警察局长迈克尔·哈里森(Michael Harrison)说:“当时，由于911事件，社区里有太多的恐惧。”他在新奥尔良警察局一路晋升，经历了这些变化。“这成为了更多警察的概念——用更多的警察做更多的事情。”
在巴尔的摩，那里弗雷迪·格雷之死2016年点燃了全国范围内的抗议活动，并为有关911后警务的辩论增添了新的紧迫性，当地警察部门带头推进新颖且有争议的警务策略。
蓝光摄像机充斥着犯罪多发的街道。面部识别软件和电话数据收集被用来打击犯罪。
也许对居民来说最不和谐的是所谓的“间谍飞机”被部署来监视城市的大片地区。2016年启动的美国首次空中监视实验本应是秘密的。载人飞机的巨大能力使它们能够记录整个城市的户外活动。一;一个独立审计后来发现，几乎所有的间谍飞机的飞行都在大多数黑人社区上空被追踪。
自那以后，警察局暂停了该项目，新任局长哈里森专注于修复警方和社区之间的紧张关系。
哈里森说:“让我们试图篡改军国主义的面貌和心态，从战士模式转向守护者模式，在守护者模式中，我们是我们社区的守护者，而不一定是社区的战士。
但是，伤口很深。
辛普森曾为《巴尔的摩》杂志报道过该市的监控项目，他说:“巴尔的摩是最早监控本国公民的城市之一。“有很多人绝望地想要控制犯罪……所以巴尔的摩已经成为警方监控技术公司尝试他们产品的目的地。”
社区组织者Grandpre说，这种电子监控实验“只是加剧了警察和社区之间的分歧。”
格兰普说:“9/11之后，随着巴尔的摩的高犯罪率，有一种观念认为任何事情都是可以接受的。
现在，20年过去了，美国人终于回到了911事件前的话题，关于警务以及一个国家治理自己的真正意义。
“绝对有偏见。绝对有种族歧视。我们可以开始谈论其中的一些事情，”伯班克说。
这些警察项目的支持者强调需要尝试一些新的和不同的东西。“我们一直在做的事情并没有奏效，”巴尔的摩一名退休护士、警察监控的支持者joary Jones说，他决定在项目公开后开始为运营飞机的监控公司工作。
“美国公民自由联盟(American Civil Liberties Union)和所有那些真正抱怨自己公民自由的人——我没有这些，因为当我走到外面时，我必须看着并躲避子弹，”琼斯说。
琼斯并不是唯一支持这些项目的人。“公众对此表示支持，”哈里森专员说。“有很高比例的社区调查支持它...我们看了所有这些。”
但是，在经历了一年备受瞩目的警察杀人事件和许多城市暴力犯罪的激增后，改革者们继续问:这些警察的做法是否奏效?
“人们谈论二分法:我们是想要安全，还是想要自由?但一些与我交谈过的专家说，这是一种错误的二分法，”辛普森说。“您是否通过这项技术获得了更多的安全性?巴尔的摩的犯罪率在变好吗?没有。”
辛普森说:“所有这些技术都被增加了，其中很多是在911事件后增加的。“部署这一切会让你失去什么?”
'The Longest Shadow': 9/11 leads to the militarization of US police departments
The sky was clear and blue. The gray towers stood, both guarding and welcoming, at the gateway to the nation. Out of nowhere came the impact, the blaze, the smoke -- and then the towers were gone. When the dust and flames finally cleared, a new world had emerged.
The death and destruction defined that late summer day and remain seared in the minds of those who lived through Sept. 11, 2001. From the ashes and wreckage rose a new America: a society redefined by its scars and marked by a new wartime reality -- a shadow darkened even more in recent days by the resurgence of fundamentalist Islamist rule in the far-off land that hatched the attacks.
Twenty years later -- with more than 70 million Americans born since the crucible of the attacks -- the legacy of9/11remains. From airport security to civilian policing to the most casual parts of daily life, it would be nearly impossible to identify something that remains untouched and unaffected by those terrifying hours in 2001.
This week, ABC News revisits the9/11 attacksand unwinds their aftermath, taking a deep look at the America born in the wake of destruction. "9/11 Twenty Years Later: The Longest Shadow" is a five-part documentary series narrated by George Stephanopoulos. Episodes will air on ABC News Live each night leading up to the 20th anniversary of the attacks, from Sept. 6-10. The series will be rebroadcast in full following the commemoration ceremonies on Saturday, Sept. 11.
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Part 5: A shadow so long, it covers all
The blue light may have been the strangest part.
On the streets of Baltimore, where crime proliferates in the poorest neighborhoods and economic desperation can run thick, the blue cast made it feel like one of those science-fiction movies set in a dark future of robots in control.
"I found it extremely oppressive and dystopian," said Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, a contributor to Baltimore magazine and a Pulitzer Center grantee.
The blue lights are meant to be seen. They are security cameras, and police want them to both solve crimes and deter them. In the city famed as the birthplace of America's national anthem, the lights announce that the people are being watched.
Critics say these neighborhoods coated in blue also represent something else: the failures of an overzealous surveillance state, militarized and armed to the hilt in the years since terrorists attacked the nation on Sept. 11, 2001.
Despite the city's high-tech efforts to curb crime, Baltimore still suffers from some of the highest homicide rates in the country. The city's public image -- shaped for many by the HBO crime drama "The Wire" -- remains tethered to the fraught relationship between the police and the community.
For Baltimore and other major metropolitan areas, ubiquitous surveillance and a tragic cycle of police-involved killings continue to animate the debate over U.S. law enforcement. Many of the most controversial policing practices date to 9/11, when local governments were flooded with a surge of money, technology and new crime-fighting strategies -- on top of a new mindset that assigned local cops to the front lines of the Global War on Terror. It was a time when many police departments re-fashioned themselves asparamilitary organizations, as their core mission was recalibrated from performing the traditional role of "protect and serve" to preventing the feared "second wave" of attacks for a terrorized and traumatized nation.
Police departments across the country, eager to avoid the failures that led to 9/11, scrambled to equip officers with the latest in military equipment and technology -- much of it made available by a federal government that would spend almost20 years at warin Afghanistan and Iraq. And the police forces -- always eager to hire military veterans -- were being staffed by people trained to police populations under occupation, not communities on the home front who get to decide how they want to be governed. Critics charged that racial profiling proliferated in cities like Baltimore, where the blinking blue lights became a symbol of life under a surveillance state.
"Over-policing, the racial tension -- it just exponentially grew for local policing," said Chris Burbank, a former police chief in Salt Lake City, who's now a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity.
From aerial surveillance in Baltimore to national terrorist watch lists, local police departments experimented with novel approaches to securing their streets in the years following 9/11. A scarred nation largely acquiesced.
Over time, critics of these methods say that the trauma suffered by heavily policed communities -- and the toll on residents' civil liberties -- have done more harm than good. As protests erupted across the country in the wake ofGeorge Floyd's deathin 2020, the gap between police departments and the citizens they are sworn to protect had never seemed wider.
"This separation between policing and community, I think you have to view 9/11 as gasoline that was poured on that fire," said Lawrence Grandpre, a Baltimore-based community activist and author.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a wariness of Muslims swept the country. Hate crimes against Muslims skyrocketed. Mosques became inundated with threats.
"Anything that showed that you were an Arab or a Muslim caused everyone to be suspicious of you," said Sahar Aziz, director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University Law School.
In response to the terror attacks, police departments in some major cities compiled vast databases of alleged potential terrorists and undertookambitious surveillance missionstargeting Muslim communities.
"You had massive surveillance programs by the NYPD, and the LAPD, and the FBI," said Aziz. "Muslim student organizations at universities, Muslim-owned businesses, mosques, anywhere where Muslims congregated was systematically surveilled … we were sitting ducks."
At the time of the attacks, the conversation around law enforcement was trending toward stricter guidelines for equitable policing -- including halting some of the most invasive tactics like stop-and-frisk. Years of advocacy and lobbying in Washington culminated in the End Racial Profiling Act -- a bill incoming President George W. Bush supported on the campaign trail in 2000.
"And then 2001, 9/11 happened, and it was completely off the table," Aziz said. "It was a nonstarter."
Before the 2001 terror attacks, John Farmer was the New Jersey attorney general who led the push to reform a state police culture that had itself acknowledged racial profiling and had vowed to eliminate it. After the attacks, as Farmer served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, he said he had to watch as 9/11 "had the effect of deferring the debate on racial profiling."
"Suddenly," Farmer said, "no one wanted to talk about it anymore."
Over the next decade, as American military forces engaged terrorists abroad, veterans of war returned home to continue their service as police officers. Together, with the influx of weapons of war, police throughout the U.S. began to look more and more like they were deployed on a forward operating military base.
"Police departments all over the country have acquired a pretty significant amount of military-grade weapons and equipment since 9/11," said Loren Crowe, an Army officer who served two deployments overseas. "My local police department would be well-equipped to go fight in the mountains in Afghanistan."
It all amounted to a post-9/11"over-policing"that has had debilitating effects on police-community relations, according to many who have spent their careers in law enforcement.
"At that time there was so much fear in communities because of 9/11," said Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, who experienced the changes as he worked his way up through the ranks in the New Orleans Police Department. "And it became a concept of more police -- and do more with more police."
In Baltimore, where thedeath of Freddie Grayin 2016 ignited nationwide protests and added new urgency to the debate over post-9/11 policing, the local police department led the charge in advancing novel and controversial police tactics.
Blue-light cameras flooded crime-prone streets. Facial recognition software and phone data collection were employed to fight crime.
Perhaps the most jarring to residents were the so-called "spy planes" deployed to surveil large swaths of the city. Launched in 2016, the nation's first-ever aerial surveillance experiment was meant to be secret. The manned airplanes' immense capabilities allowed them to record the outdoor movements of an entire city. Anindependent auditlater found that nearly all of the spy planes' flights tracked over majority Black communities.
The police department has since suspended the program, and Harrison, the new commissioner, is focused on mending the strained relationship between the police and the community.
"Let's try to tamper down the militaristic look and mindset, and move away from the warrior model into the guardian model, where we're guardians of our community, not necessarily warriors of the community," says Harrison.
Still, wounds run deep.
"Baltimore is one of the cities that is a pioneer in surveilling its own citizens," said Simpson, who has reported on the city's surveillance programs for Baltimore magazine. "There's a lot of desperation to get a handle on the crime … so Baltimore has become a destination for police surveillance technology companies, to try out their wares."
Grandpre, the community organizer, said this experimentation with electronic surveillance "just exacerbates the notion of a divide between the police force and the community."
"After 9/11 and with Baltimore's high crime rate, there's a notion that anything is acceptable," Grandpre said.
Now, two decades on, Americans are finally returning to pre-9/11 conversations about policing and what it really means for a nation to govern itself.
"Absolutely there's bias. Absolutely there's racism. And we can start to talk about some of these things," said Burbank.
Supporters of these police programs stress the need to try something new and different. "What we've been doing has not been working," said Joyous Jones, a retired nurse and proponent of police surveillance in Baltimore, who decided to start working for the surveillance company running the planes after the program became public.
"The [American Civil Liberties Union] and all those people that really complain about their civil liberties -- I don't have that because when I walk outside, I have to look and dodge bullets," Jones said.
Jones is not alone in her support for the programs. "There was public support for it," Commissioner Harrison said. "There were community surveys that were in high percentage in favor of it ... and we looked at all of that."
But after a year of high-profile police-involved killings and a spike in violent crime in many cities, reformers continue to ask: Are these police practices even working?
"People talk about the dichotomy: Do we want security, or do we want liberty? But some of the experts I spoke with say that's sort of a false dichotomy," Simpson said. "Are you getting more security with this technology? Is the crime rate in Baltimore getting better? No."
"All these technologies have been added, a lot of them since 9/11," Simpson said. "And what are you losing by deploying all this?"
