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The Founders and their contemporaries would probably have seen even the early nineteenth-century police forces as a standing army, and a particularly odious one at that.
Just before the American Revolution, it wasn’t the stationing of British troops in the colonies that irked patriots in Boston and Virginia; it was England’s decision to use the troops for everyday law enforcement.
early American statesmen like Madison, Washington, and Adams were well versed in the history of armies in Eur...
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Today in America SWAT teams violently smash into private homes more than one hundred times per day.
the company Heckler and Koch marketed its MP5 semiautomatic weapon with the slogan “From the Gulf War to the Drug War—Battle Proven.”
Today, the company that has trained more police officers in lethal force than any other stresses that police officers aren’t shooting people enough, and teaches them to get over the natural human tendency to hesitate before snuffing out another life. Older police officers interviewed for this book say they couldn’t remember a single time they or a colleague killed a dog. One recent study found that in Los Angeles alone, police killed about sixty dogs per year.4 Another found a strong correlation between police militarization and the rate at which officers kill both dogs and human beings.
Democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity. —H. L. MENCKEN, NOTES ON DEMOCRACY
Ironically, the more centralized, less democratic London model proved to be more protective of individual rights than early American police departments.
With no training or standards, and with jobs based on patronage more than merit, the police in America were best known for corruption, brutality, and incompetence. Wealthy citizens looked instead to private organizations like the Pinkertons when they needed reliable security or knew of a crime they wanted solved.
Anti-alcohol activist
Clarence True Wilson demanded that the Harding administration call up the Marines, “arm them to the teeth and send them to the speakeasies. Give the people inside a few minutes to depart, and if they chose not to, open fire anyhow.”
One day, with a big smile on my face, I popped in to tell my deputy chief, Ed Davis, that I thought up an acronym for my special new unit. He was still, as we all were, glued to the classic concepts of policing, which discourage the formation of military-type units.
But he realized some changes would have to be made. “It’s SWAT,” I said. “Oh, that’s pretty good. What’s it stand for?” “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” Davis blinked at me. “No.”
There was no way, he said dismissively, he would ever use the word “attack.” I went out, crestfallen, but a moment later I was back. “Special Weapons and Tactics,” I said. “Okay?” “No problem. That...
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The standard cry was, “Hey, the LAPD is supposed to be a civil police force. Their job is to relate to the community, not put on combat boots and assault the community.”
Though at times, assault is not a dirty word.
In his drug war history Smoke and Mirrors, journalist Dan Baum points out that Black homicide arrests doubled between 1960 and 1967. At the same time, heroin deaths and overdoses were also on the rise. The hippie, antiwar, and counterculture movements were in full swing. All of this also coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement. Nixon’s Silent Majority began to see a link between drugs, crime, the counterculture, and race.
it wasn’t true that drug use was causing the surge in violent crime. A 1971 study from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs—the government’s antidrug enforcement arm itself—found that illicit drug users were 35 percent less likely to be arrested and charged with homicide than non-drug-users, and less than half as likely to be charged with aggravated assault.
Nixon’s “ignored Americans” weren’t the least bit troubled by what they saw from Daley and the police. According to a Gallup poll taken a few weeks later,
56 percent of the country supported the crackdown, and just 31 percent were opposed.
In 1969 Newsweek commissioned its own Gallup poll for a cover story headlined, “The Troubled American: A Special Report on the White Majority.” Its findings: 85 percent of whites thought that Black militants were getting off too easily; 65 percent thought that unemployed Blacks were more likely to get government aid than unemployed whites; and 66 percent thought that the police needed to be given more power.
Most Americans felt perfectly safe walking in their own neighborhoods, but assumed most of their fellow citizens didn’t feel the same way. As he slogged through the primaries in early 1968, Nixon was well aware of this. People don’t have to experience crime firsthand to feel threatened by it, he wrote to his old friend and mentor, Dwight Eisenhower. “I have found great audience response to this [law-and-order] theme in all parts of the country, including areas like New Hampshire where there is virtually no race problem and relatively little crime.”
One of the community leaders, Julius Hobson, a cofounder of the DC statehood party, suggested greeting the raiding cops with a shotgun. “I would shoot him down in cold blood just like I would swat a fly,” he said. Three other Black leaders, all clergy, agreed with him.
They weren’t alone in that sentiment. During the House debate on the bill, Rep. Bertram Podell, a white Democrat from Brooklyn, said that he too would shoot any police officer who tried to enter his home unannounced.
Marion Barry, who just a year earlier had encouraged DC residents to take up arms against any cops who broke into their homes,
“Your whole lifestyle changes, and perhaps your morals too.
Turner lumped pot with rock music, open and abundant sex, and ripped jeans. Drug use, Turner warned, was “a behavioral pattern that has sort of tagged along during the present young-adult generation’s involvement in anti-military, anti–nuclear power, anti–big business, anti-authority demonstrations.” People engaged in this behavior, he explained, “form a myriad of different racial, religious or otherwise persuasions demanding ‘rights’ or ‘entitlements’ politically,” while scoffing at civil responsibility. At a 1981 meeting with his staff, Turner laid out his office’s mission: “We have to
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Conservatives had always held the somewhat contradictory position that government can’t be trusted in any area of society except when it comes to the power to arrest, detain, imprison, and execute people.
But Reagan didn’t dance around the contradiction, he embraced it. He blamed crime on big government—and in the same breath demanded that the government be given significantly more power to fight it.
“For all our science and sophistication, for all of our justified pride in intellectual accomplishment, we must never forget the jungle is always there waiting to take us over,” Reagan said.
“Only our deep moral values and our strong social institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.”
The Democrats were eager to eliminate the perception that they were softer on crime than the Republicans. Senator Joe Biden, for example, pre-empted the White House–sponsored bill with a bill of his own, which gave Reagan everything he wanted on asset forfeiture.
On September 30, 1982, the crime bill loaded up with most of the provisions Reagan wanted passed the Senate 95–1.
In 1990 Bennett floated the idea of suspending habeas corpus for drug offenders. “It’s a funny war when the ‘enemy’ is entitled to due process of law and a fair trial,” he told Fortune. Lest that seem too extreme, he hedged a bit.
“By the way, I’m in favor of due process. But that kind of slows things down.”31 Later he told Larry King that he’d be up for beheading drug dealers. He conceded that doing so might be “legally difficult,” but said that, “morally, I have no problem with it.”
One poll found that 83 percent of respondents would call the police on a drug-using relative.
Urging families to turn one another in to the government for victimless crimes was once an idea we associated with Iron Curtain regimes. But the drug war encouraged it.
Back in 1983, Daryl Gates had started the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, which sent cops into Los Angeles schools to talk to students about drugs. The program swept the country, and by the mid-1990s there were numerous reports of children who had turned in...
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DARE officials denied that the program encouraged such behavior, but in most cases the children were commended by police and DARE for “doing the right thing” after watching their parents marched into squad cars an...
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FBI director William Sessions declared that the country would need to “strike a new balance between order and individual liberties.”
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. William Crowe went further, stating that with the new antidrug offensive, “you’re probably going to have to infringe on some human rights.”
In testimony before Congress, Daryl Gates proclaimed that casual drug use was “treason,” then recommended that users be “taken out and shot.” It was an especially odd comment given that Gates’...
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Democrats in Congress savaged Bennett and Bush’s drug plan—for not going far enough.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden told the Associated Press that, “quite frankly,” the Bush-Bennett plan “is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand.”
He damned methadone treatment as “a crime” and snapped that anyone who even mentioned legalization was committing “moral suicide.”
In a September 1989 poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News, 62 percent of the country said that they would “be willing to give up a few of the freedoms we have in this country if it meant we could greatly reduce the amount of illegal drug use.”
Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38? With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun. —US MILITARY OFFICER WHO CONDUCTED TRAINING SEMINARS FOR CIVILIAN SWAT TEAMS IN THE 1990S
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had led the Republican push for the 1988 drug bill that included the death penalty for drug dealers
“We look forward to the day when our Congress… allows the Army to lend its full strength toward making America drug free.”
“The Soviet threat is being taken away from us,” one DC military scholar explained to the Chicago Tribune. “The Department of Defense had better develop some social-utility arguments that match the requirements of the American people.”
