Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

by Radley Balko

Today in America SWAT teams violently smash into private homes more than one hundred times per day. The vast majority of these raids are to enforce laws against consensual crimes.

This sort of force was once reserved as the last option to defuse a dangerous situation. It’s increasingly used as the first option to apprehend people who aren’t dangerous at all.

How did we get here? How did we evolve from a country whose founding statesmen were adamant about the dangers of armed, standing government forces—a country that enshrined the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights and revered and protected the age-old notion that the home is a place of privacy and sanctuary—to a country where it has become acceptable for armed government agents dressed in battle garb to storm private homes in the middle of the night—not

How did a country pushed into a revolution by protest and political speech become one where protests are met with flash grenades, pepper spray, and platoons of riot teams dressed like Robocops?

The fact is that we need cops, and there are limited situations in which we need SWAT teams. If anything, this is an anti-politician book. Bad cops are the product of bad policy. And policy is ultimately made by politicians. A bad system loaded with bad incentives will unfailingly produce bad cops.

The English tradition was different. Because of its isolation, England was relatively more stable than continental Europe during the Dark and Middle Ages. It didn’t face the constant threat of revolution. Ruling regimes in other parts of Europe had to maintain order by suppressing dissent and keeping the public from posing a threat to them. In Britain, preserving order meant protecting lives, rights, and property from thieves, vandals, and murderers. Consequently, the English benefited from an orientation toward local rather than centralized policing.

The English system also benefited from its adherence to common law rather than Roman law. Because the objective of common law is dispute resolution rather than enforcing the will of the sovereign, it offers more protection of individual rights. English citizens’ ability to sue law enforcers who violated their rights was unheard of in countries with centralized policing forces.

public officials, judges, mayors, district attorneys, police chiefs, public health directors, and community leaders rarely, if ever, meet as a group to discuss urban drug control goals and problems. And they never meet to discuss police drug raids unless something goes awry.

Columbine was precisely the sort of incident for which the SWAT team had been invented. It was the sort of incident often cited by defenders of SWAT teams to justify their existence. And it was the sort of incident for which even critics of SWAT teams concede the use of a SWAT team would be appropriate. Yet not only did the SWAT teams at the scene not confront the killers, potentially costing innocent lives, but the most respected SWAT team in the country then reviewed the Jefferson County team’s actions and found their actions were appropriate.

the typical school campus can expect to see a homicide about once every several thousand years—hardly justification to rush out to get a SWAT team.68 Yet many college campuses now have their own paramilitary police teams, and many cited Columbine and Virginia Tech as the reason they needed one.

When the police come to a protest dressed like that, armed, and expecting confrontation, both police and protesters start to think that a confrontation is inevitable. This was why, at the height of the often-violent protests of the 1970s, Washington, DC, police chief Jerry Wilson put cops in traditional police blues on the front lines, but kept his riot squad on buses parked on side streets—ready, but out of sight.

As a resident of Washington DC, I find this really interesting. I moved here in 2005 and I've generally been impressed with how well MPD has handled protests.

In 2003 Police Chief Raymond Kelly estimated that at least 10 percent of the city’s more than 450 monthly no-knock drug raids were served on the wrong address, were served under bad information, or otherwise didn’t produce enough evidence for an arrest. Incredibly, Kelly made that estimate in defense of the way the NYPD was handling these raids.

Perhaps no one was more victimized by the battlefield mentality that had set in at the NYPD than Walter and Rose Martin. The Brooklyn couple, both in their eighties, were wrongly raided more than fifty times between 2002 and 2010. The couple filed numerous complaints with the police department. They wrote letters to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. They were ignored. In 2007 they at least got someone at the NYPD to try to wipe their address out of the department’s computer system. But the raids continued. It wasn’t until the couple went to the media in 2010 that the city finally looked into the problem. Back in 2002, someone had used the Martins’ address as a dummy address to test the department’s new computer system.

the argument that well-armed criminals have made cops’ jobs more dangerous than ever just isn’t backed up by the data. The job of police officer has been getting progressively safer for a generation. The number of officer fatalities peaked in 1974 and has been steadily dropping since.

the homicide rate for police officers in 2010 (the last year for which data is available) was about 7.9 per 100,000 officers. That’s about 60 percent higher than the overall homicide rate in America, which is 4.8. But it’s lower than the homicide rates in many large cities, including Atlanta (17.3), Boston (11.3), Dallas (11.3), Kansas City (21.1), Nashville (8.9), Pittsburgh (17.3), St. Louis (40.5), and Tulsa (13.7). In fact, of the seventy-four US cities with populations of 250,000 or more, thirty-six have murder rates higher than that of police in America. You’re more likely to be murdered just by living in these cities than the average American police officer is to be murdered on the job.

If you approach the job as if every day could be your last, you’re going to approach every citizen encounter as if it could be your last. That makes everyone a potential enemy. The job becomes about survival, not public service. Hence, the unofficial motto of the job you often hear from cops, or see posted on police discussion boards: “Whatever I need to do to get home safe at the end of the day.”

Cops are told all the time that the public presents a threat to them, and that the threat grows more dire by the day. But as for what sort of threat cops pose to the public, the public isn’t permitted to know.

Even in the rare case when a court has found that the use of the grenades was unreasonable, and therefore a violation of a plaintiff’s constitutional rights, the same court inevitably finds that the police officers are protected by qualified immunity,

In 2004, for example, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that “blindly” tossing a flash-bang grenade into a house or room with no certainty as to who and how many people might have been inside was unreasonable. But because it wasn’t so unreasonable as to be established law or obvious to a layperson, the officers in that case still couldn’t be held liable.

Unlikely federal agencies that have used SWAT teams: US Fish and Wildlife Service, Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, US National Park Service, Food and Drug Administration

I was surprised to see NASA on the list so I Googled it and it's real: https://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/main/swat_feature.html

Perhaps most distressing of all, not only does the military continue to provide surplus weapons to domestic police agencies, but thanks to the Department of Homeland Security grants, military contractors are now shifting to market resources toward police agencies. Worse, a new industry appears to be emerging just to convert those grants into battle-grade gear. That means we’ll soon have powerful private interests, funded by government grants, who will lobby for more government grants to pay for further militarization—a police industrial complex. It’s a threshold that will be difficult to uncross. No, America today isn’t a police state. Far from it. But it would be foolish to wait until it becomes one to get concerned.