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

by Radley Balko

In 1992 University of Minnesota law professor Myron Orfield sent a questionnaire to Chicago judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys to determine the state of the Fourth Amendment in that city. Even cynics would find the results dispiriting.

More than one-fifth of Chicago judges believed that police lie in court more than half the time when questioned about searches and seizures. Ninety-two percent of judges said that police lie “at least some of the time,” and 38 percent of judges said that they believed that police superiors encourage subordinates to lie in court.

More than 50 percent of respondents believed that at least “half of the time” the prosecutor “knows or has reason to know” that police fabricate evidence. Another 93 percent of respondents (including 89 percent of the prosecutors) reported that ...

Sixty-one percent of respondents, including half of the surveyed prosecutors, believed that prosecutors know or have reason to know that police fabricate evidence in case reports, and half of prosecutors ...

When Gallup asked, “Do you think there is police brutality in your area?” in 1967, just 6 percent said yes. In July 1991, it was 39 percent.

Attorney General Janet Reno explained this strategy in a speech to defense and intelligence specialists. “So let me welcome you to the kind of war our police fight every day,” Reno said. “And let me challenge you to turn your skills that served us so well in the Cold War to helping us with the war we’re now fighting daily in the streets of our towns and cities across the nation.”

“NOW, IF THE BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO AND FIREARMS comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests.… They’ve got a big target on there, ATF. Don’t shoot at that, because they’ve got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots.… Kill the sons of bitches.”

That was G. Gordon Liddy, giving his listeners home defense advice on his syndicated radio show in August 1994. It was some remarkable language to be coming from the guy who helped create ODALE, the Nixon-era office that sent narcotics task forces barreling into homes to make headline-grabbing drug busts.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama and Joe Biden—but especially Biden—credited the COPS program as the reason behind America’s historic crime drop that began in 1994.

Biden’s campaign website during the 2008 primaries exclaimed, “In the 1990s, the Biden Crime Bill [an incarnation of the final bill establishing COPS] added 100,000 cops to America’s streets. As a result, murder and violent crime rates went down eight years in a row.”

A 2007 analysis in the peer-reviewed academic journal Criminology concluded that “COPS spending had little to no effect on crime.”

if the justification for SWAT teams is to have a team of brave, highly trained, highly professional, well-armed, and well-protected cops to intervene in such tragedies, Columbine is a particularly unfortunate example.

Though there were eventually eight hundred police officers and eight SWAT teams on the Columbine campus, the SWAT teams held off from going inside to stop shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris because they deemed the situation too dangerous.

While one murder after another was being perpetrated, a dozen police officers were stationed near [the] exit. These officers made no attempt to enter the building, walk 15 steps, and confront the murderers. (According to police speaking on condition of anonymity, one Denver SWAT officer did begin to enter but was immediately “ordered down” by commanders.)

Twenty minutes after the rampage began, three SWAT officers were finally sent into the building—on the first floor, on the side of the building furthest from the library, where killings were in progress. Finding students rushing out of the building, they decided to escort students out, rather than track down the killers. This began a police program to “contain the perimeter.”

Instead of confronting the killers, then, the SWAT team f...

They then passed on another chance to confront Ha...

The two murderers eventually tired of the library killings, and went downstairs to the cafeteria. More students were hiding in a room nearby, with the door locked. The two murderers att...

Students in the room had called 911 and the line was open, so again the killers’ location was known. Many officers were massed near the cafeteria door. They knew where the murderers were. They knew that the murderers were attempting ...

it took more than three hours for the SWAT team to finally reach the victims. In the meantime, science teacher David Sanders bled to death on the second floor. He might have survived had he received reasonably prompt medical attention—he

The LAPD SWAT team was later asked to review the actions of their colleagues in Jefferson County. They found that the officers had followed standard procedure.

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 town of Ithaca, New York, reformulated its SWAT team in 2000, for example, Assistant Commander Peter Tyler was asked why a college town with virtually no violent crime needed a SWAT team in the first place. He pointed to Columbine and similar mass shootings. “I think it’s naive for anyone to think it couldn’t happen here in Ithaca,” he said.

A 2002 Miami Herald article on the spread of SWAT teams in Florida noted that “police say they want [SWAT teams] in case of a hostage situation or a Columbine-type incident.

most such shootings are also over within seconds, far less time than it would take a typical SWAT team to scramble to the scene.

It’s also important to note that though they make huge headlines and spark weeks of breathless coverage, school shootings (and mass shootings in general) are exceedingly rare. University of Virginia psychologist and education professor Dewey Cornell, who studies violence prevention and school safety, has estimated that 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.

Number of SWAT raids conducted by the Minneapolis Police Department in 1987: 36 Number of SWAT raids conducted by the Minneapolis Police Department in 1996: over 700

Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in the United States in 1980: 3,000 Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in 1995: 30,000

Percentage of police departments in cities of 100,000 or more that had a SWAT team in 1982: 59 percent … in 1995: 89 percent

Percentage increase in the number of police departments using tactical units for proactive patrol from 1982 to 1997: 292 percent71

She eventually started a sex crimes unit within the department. But it was a small department with a tight budget.

When she couldn’t get the money she needed, Taylor was forced to give speeches and write her own proposals to keep her program operating.

What troubled her was that while the sex crimes unit had to find funding on its own, the SWAT team was always flush with cash. “The SWAT team, the drug ...

“They did their thing,” Taylor says. “Everybody on the floor, guns and yelling. Then they put the two kids in the bedroom, did their search, then sent me in to take care of the kids.”

Taylor made her way inside to see them. When she opened the door, the eight-year-old girl assumed a defense posture, putting herself between Taylor and her little brother. She looked at Taylor and said, half fearful, half angry, “What are you going to do to us?”

Taylor was shattered. “Here I come in with all my SWAT gear on, dressed in armor from head to toe, and this little girl looks up at me, and her only...

I thought, How can we be the good guys when we come into the house looking like this, screaming and pointing guns at the people they love? How can we be the good guys when a little girl looks up at me and wants to fight me? And for what? W...

the mentality changes when they get put on the SWAT team. I remember a guy I was good friends with, it just completely changed him. The us-versus-them mentality takes over. You see that mentality in regular patrol officers too. But it’s much, much worse on the SWAT team.

Taylor recently ran into the little girl who changed the way she thought about policing. Now in her twenties, the girl told Taylor that she and her brother had nightmares for years after the raid. They slept in the same bed until the boy was eleven. “That was a difficult day at work for me,” she says. “But for her, this was the most traumatic, defining moment of this girl’s life. Do you know what we found? We didn’t find any weapons. No big drug operation. We found three joints and a pipe.”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama criticized Bush and the Republicans for cutting Byrne, a federal police program beloved by his running mate Joe Biden.

In the summer of 2002, Biden was pushing his RAVE Act, an absurdly broad law that would have made venue and club owners liable for running a drug operation if they merely sold the “paraphernalia” common to parties where people took Ecstasy—accessories like bottled water and glow sticks.

Once again a politician had demagogued worries over a mostly harmless drug into a climate of fear. And once again that fear led to aggressive, wholly disproportionate crackdowns across the country.

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. In fact, 2012 was the safest year for police officers since the 1950s.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, 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 (1...

In March 2006, just two months after its ridiculous gambling investigation resulted in the death of an unarmed man, the Fairfax County Police Department issued a press release warning residents not to participate in office betting pools tied to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The title: “Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk.”

In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million promoting the state lottery.

As if the shock of having his house invaded by a SWAT team wasn’t enough, Nuckols was in for another surprise.

He then looked up, and saw… former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal, an aspiring lawman, had been made an “honorary deputy” with the department. Though he had no training as a SWAT officer, Shaq apparently had gone on several such raids with other police departments around the country. The thrill of bringing an untrained celebrity along apparently trumped the requirement that SWAT teams be staffed only with the most elite, most highly qualified and best-trained cops.

According to Nuckols, O’Neal reached into Nuckols’s pickup, snatched up his (perfectly legal) rifle, and exclaimed, “We’ve got a gun!” O’Neal told Time that Nuckols’s description of the raid on his home was exaggerated. “It ain’t no story,” he said. “We did everything right, went to the judge, got a warrant. You know, they make it seem like we beat him up, and that never happened. We went in, talked to him, took some stuff, returned it—bada bam, bada bing.”