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

by Radley Balko

Incidentally, there have been other strange incidents of SWAT teams with star power. Matt Damon accompanied SWAT officers on several raids while preparing for the movie The Departed. And after police mistakenly shot and killed immigrant and father Ismael Mena on a raid in Denver in 1999, they revealed that Colorado Rockies first baseman Mike Lansing had gone along...

In 2010 a massive Maricopa County SWAT team, including a tank and several armored vehicles, raided the home of Jesus Llovera. The tank in fact drove straight into Llovera’s living room. Driving the tank? Action movie star Steven Seagal, whom Sheriff Joe Arpaio had recently deputized. Seagal had also been putting on the camouflage to help Arpaio with his controversial immigration raids. All of this, by the way, was getting caught on film...

Llovera’s suspected crime? Cockfighting. Critics said that Arpaio and Seagal brought an army to arrest a man suspected of fighting chickens to play for the cameras. Seagal’s explanation for the show of force: “Animal cruelty is one of my pet peeves.” All of Llovera’s ch...

Judging from other clips on the TLC website, some of which featured shots of the female officers in bikinis, it seemed that the network couldn’t make up its mind whether these women were sexpots with handcuffs or girl cops who were just as rough and tough as the boys. A poster ad campaign for the show only reinforced the identity crisis. One read: “Taser Time.” Another: “Cavity Search, Anyone?”

Have no doubt, police in the United States are militarizing, and in many communities, particularly those of color, the message is being received loud and clear: “You are the enemy.” —TOM NOLAN, A TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR BOSTON POLICE OFFICER TURNED LAW PROFESSOR, IN AN OP-ED (“STOP ARMING THE POLICE LIKE A MILITARY,” DEFENSE ONE, JUNE 24, 2014)

It was quite a contrast to the overwhelming police response months earlier in Ferguson, despite the fact that there were twice as many people injured in one day of rioting in Keene than in weeks of protests in Ferguson.8

And as Arpaio made clear to the Arizona Republic, there would be no putting this toothpaste back in the tube. Despite his ouster from 1033, he had found other funding for the war gear: he’d just purchased four hundred AR-15s for his department with federal anti-racketeering grants. As for Babeu, his 2012 bid for Congress was cut short when an undocumented immigrant alleged that he’d been having an affair with the sheriff since 2006, and that Babeu had threatened him with deportation to ensure his silence. Babeu, a hard-line immigration hawk, responded by acknowledging he is gay, but denied the deportation allegations, and dropped out of the race. He was subsequently reelected as sheriff and waged a second bid for Congress in 2016 as an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump. He briefly made news when his campaign tweeted condemnation of Trump after the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape. But Babeu quickly retracted the condemnation, fired his campaign spokesman, and reiterated his “unwavering” support for Trump. He ultimately lost that race as well and retired as sheriff in 2017.

“YOUR JOB IS TO HUNT KILLERS,” LT. COL. DAVID GROSSMAN says, as he paces back and forth at the front of a hotel conference room full of police officers. “And only a killer can hunt a killer.”

Toward the end of the lecture, Grossman lets the class in on a little secret. It’s a secret, he says, that he’s heard from just about every police officer he’s spoken to who killed another human being. Here’s the secret: after your first kill, you’ll go home and have the best sex of your life.

Grossman and his business partner Jim Glennon run Calibre Press, a company that sells lectures, books, and guides with titles like “The Warrior’s Edge,” “Arresting Communication,” and “Female Enforcers.” Between them, Grossman, Glennon, and their associates have likely trained more police officers on the use of lethal force than anyone in America.

Thousands of police officers have taken their classes, which they’ve been teaching for about twenty years. Sometimes they’re hired by police departments. In other cases, officers pay for the classes on their own. Grossman has claimed he’s booked for speaking engagements 200–300 days per year.

Grossman argues that in order to be effective, police officers must train themselves to ignore our psychological barrier to killing, to the point where taking another life is instinctive.

The syllabus for the class includes a page headlined with the question “Thou Shalt Not Kill?” It’s followed by twelve Bible verses that, in Grossman’s view, demonstrate the circumstances under which God himself is okay with righteous killing.

In his second book, On Combat, Grossman introduced a metaphor about wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs that’s now part of military and law enforcement nomenclature. In the metaphor, the police (and well-meaning gun owners) are the sheepdogs. Their job is to protect the populace (sheep) from the wolves (criminals).

When explaining the metaphor, Grossman stresses that sheepdogs are far more similar to wolves than they are to sheep. They’re killers too. They just know how to channel their more primitive instincts.

A video that went viral in 2014 showed just how dangerous the ambush myth can be. In it, a South Carolina state trooper opened fire on an unarmed Black man after pulling him over for a seatbelt violation. The officer fired after the Black man reached into his SUV to obtain his license. The officer would later say in court that he “was hearing and seeing things that the video proved didn’t exist, but in my mind, it was a very real threat to me.”

In 2013, several media outlets reported that Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., a company that provides targets for those police shooting drills, sold a line of targets called “No More Hesitation.” Those targets featured grandparents, children, and a pregnant woman, all holding guns. One of the targets was titled “Little Boy with Real Gun.”

(one officer explain[ed] that he enlarged photos of his own kids to use as targets so that he would not be caught off guard with such a drastically new experience while on duty).

A report from the state attorney general found that Black motorists made up 86 percent of traffic stops in the city. They were also searched more often and comprised 92 percent of arrests after a stop. This, despite the fact that searches of white motorists were more likely to turn up contraband.

Brown’s family and their supporters were already upset that police had left his body on the street for more than four hours after he died. Then a police officer let his dog urinate on the memorial. Later that evening, police vehicles would run over the memorial, crushing the objects left behind.

police met the protesters in full-on riot gear. CNN cameras captured one police officer screaming at protesters, “Bring it, all you fucking animals! Bring it!” Fires, rioting, and looting followed.

The police response in Ferguson again ignited a national discussion about police militarization. Iconic photos emerged from the protests, including one of a sniper mounted on an armored vehicle aiming his rifle at peaceful, unarmed protesters with their hands in the air.

Journalist Kelsey Atherton assembled dozens of tweets from veterans of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan who were angry at what they saw. Some were upset that these police officers who were responding to an American protest by American citizens on American soil were better armed and better equipped than their own units had been overseas.

A veteran of the army’s 82nd Airborne Division tweeted of the images coming out of Ferguson, “We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone.” Another veteran tweeted, “I led foot patrols in downtown Baquba, Iraq with less firepower than Ferguson PD.”

Former soldier Brandon Friedman posted a photo of one of the cops in Ferguson next to a photo of himself while he was deployed and wrote, “The gentleman on the left has more personal body ...

DORAVILLE, GEORGIA, IS A SUBURB NORTHEAST OF ATLANTA. It has comparatively large Asian and Latino populations for a suburban town of about 10,000 people. In 2014, the front page of the website for the town’s police department featured a video of an armored, tracked SWAT vehicle tearing through a patch of grass.

White smoke then appears in the frame, along with a team of camouflage-clad SWAT officers. Throughout the video, the SWAT operation was interspersed with flashes of two symbols. The first is the insignia of the Punisher, the vigilante Marvel Comics character.

The other is an image of an eagle clutching a rifle, a lightning bolt, and a dagger dripping in blood. The audio was a thrash metal ditty called “D...

At the time, the town hadn’t had a murder in five years. (As of 2018, there had been one murder in nine years.)

So, what, exactly, do Doraville’s police officers do? One big priority appears to be collecting revenue for the local government.

According to a lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice, Doraville budgets for up to 30 percent of town revenue to come from fines and fees...

On average, Doraville police officers write forty tickets per day, imposing fines amounting to $814 f...

Cops also ticket residents for cracked driveways, untended lawns, and peeling paint on their homes. One resident was fined for having a pile of firewood in his yard, then sentenced to twel...

The Punisher logo in particular has become ubiquitous in law enforcement, despite protest from the comic’s creators.

When police leadership in St. Louis opened an investigation into officers who had been using the symbol, the head of the police union called on police across the country to tweet the Punisher logo as a show of support for cops, and to antagonize those who criticize them.

“It’s how we show the world that we hold the line between good and evil,” he wrote.

Chris Kyle, the Marine depicted in the American Sniper movie, helped popularize the logo. He wrote about its prominence among US troops during the war in Iraq. “We spray-painted it on our Hummers and body armor, and our helmets and all our guns. We spray-painted it on every building or wall we could. We wanted people to know, We’re here and we want to fuck with you,” he wrote.

“It was our version of psyops. You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us. Because we will kill you, motherfucker. You are bad. We are badder. We are bad-ass.” Kyle would later claim (probably inaccurately) to have carried out dozens of extrajudicial executions after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

The logo for South Carolina’s Fifteenth Circuit Drug Enforcement Unit is a skull and crossbones, a marijuana leaf, a lightning bolt, and a sword, along with the slogan “Serving Our Community… One Dealer at a Time.”

The following year, another DC officer wore a T-shirt to court that read, “Police Brutality: Doing what their parents should have!”

In 2003, a police officer in Las Vegas shot and killed an unarmed Black man who at the time was on his knees and attempting to surrender. He was shot in the back.

At the time he was shot, he was watching his girlfriend’s children. Las Vegas cops then had T-shirts made featuring the rifle of the officer who killed Barlow along with the phrase “Baby Daddy Removal Team.”

That phrase, and the acronym BDRT, became a popular theme on police T-shirts. I found lots of other examples, including a union for school police officers in California that sold T-shirts with the image of a chil...

THE FBI HAS BEEN WARNING FOR YEARS THAT WHITE SUPREMACISTS are infiltrating law enforcement groups. The agency put out a bulletin in 2006 warning of the threat, though tellingly, the agency seemed most worried about the threat to law enforcement, not to the people they serve.

Michael German, a former FBI agent, wrote in a 2020 piece for the Brennan Center that “since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere.”

In Little Rock, Arkansas, a 2006 police recruit was revealed to have attended a KKK meeting and lied about it on his application. He was hired anyway, likely because his fath...

In 2017, a Black couple looking to buy a house toured a home for sale by a twenty-two-year police officer in Muskegon, Michigan. The couple was first alarmed to find several Confederate flags hanging in an “antique room.” They also then found a framed application to the KKK hanging on a wall.

That officer had been cleared of killing a Black man

an Elkhart, Indiana, cop who used the department’s communications equipment to promote “white power” was promoted to sergeant, despite being disciplined for other misconduct more than two dozen times.

In San Francisco, fourteen officers sent racist texts with language encouraging the killing of “half-breeds” and “all niggers must fucking hang,” most of whom remain on the force.