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

by Radley Balko

OVER THE YEARS, HEATHER MAC DONALD HAS PREDICTED A lot of crime waves. In 2005, she warned about undocumented immigrants in an article titled “The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave” and followed up with testimony before Congress.25 In both she cited a number of startling statistics about undocumented immigrants and crime and predicted that “sanctuary city” policies would portend a wave of violence.

Meanwhile, the violent crime rate continued to fall, hitting a fifty-year low in 2014. All the while, studies consistently show that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens.

Mac Donald’s next crime wave was supposed to happen when New York City ended its stop-and-frisk policy.

She wrote in the Wall Street Journal that if a federal judge ruled the wrong way in a lawsuit seeking to end the practice, the “national trend of declining crime could hang in the balance.”

That crime wave never happened, either. The number of stops dropped from 191,000 in 2013 to just 11,000 in 2018. The city’s crime rate over that period dropped to a record low.

Mac Donald was back at it in the Wall Street Journal in 2015 with “The New Nationwide Crime Wave,” and then in 2016 with “The...

This time she blamed the Fergus...

In her Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mac Donald listed six cities where the murder rate for the first half of 2015 had risen over the first half of 2014. She also warned of an 89 percent increase in police sh...

But context is important. As previously noted, for reasons that aren’t clear 2013 was a freakishly safe year for cops, with just twenty-seven killed on the job, an all-time low. There were forty-eight killings the year before, fifty-one killings in 2014, a...

Moreover, the Ferguson protests happened in August 2014, and there were just nineteen killings of police officers over the remainder of that year. The protests resumed in 2015, which en...

Simply put, there was no correlation between the Ferguson protests and an increase in killings of police officers.

In 2008, a federal judge excoriated the St. Louis Police Department after finding that over a five-year period, just one of the three-hundred-plus complaints against officers had been sustained.

Studies have shown similarly low sustain rates in Newark (5 percent), New Orleans (5.5 percent), and Cleveland (3 percent). A 2017 report found that 80 percent of the Cleveland complaints filed the previous year hadn’t even been processed.

Derek Chauvin, the officer who put his knee on George Floyd’s neck, had seventeen prior misconduct complaints against him and had been named in a brutality lawsuit.

The only punishment he received over the course of his career: two ...

According to a 2015 YouGov/Huffington Post poll, 74 percent of Black parents warned their children to be cautious around police, versus 32 percent of white parents.

A 2016 Pew poll found that seven in ten white people thought police usually use the right amount of force versus just one in three Black people.

An interesting 2017 Pew poll asked police officers if the high-profile police killings of Black people were isolated incidents or part of a more systemic problem. More than seven in ten white officers said these were isolated incidents, while nearly six in ten Black officers said there was a broader problem.

Perhaps most revealing of all: A 2019 YouGov poll found that more Black people were more worried about being a victim of police violence than being a victim of violent crime. That is, they feared the police more than they feared the criminals.

For years, Chicago PD has had one of the lowest murder clearance rates of any big city department in the country—somewhere around 30–40 percent. In 2019 the department boasted a substantive increase, to 59 percent.

But a subsequent investigation revealed that 152 of the 263 murders “solved” that year were “solved exceptionally,” which means they didn’t result in an arrest. They were deemed closed because police believed the killer to be dead or because prosecutors failed to bring a case.

The clearance rate is even worse for murders with Black victims. A 2019 WBEZ investigation found that between 2018 and July 2019, police solved 47 percent of murders of white p...

For 85 percent of violent crimes in the city, the police ne...

One family with children aged fourteen, eleven, and seven was raided three times in a year, each time looking for the same suspect the family said they’d never heard of.

One commander’s forms for trespassing arrests had prewritten “black male” in the space where officers were to select race and gender.

In the summer of 2018, a Little Rock man named Roderick Talley sent me Ring video footage of a police raid on his apartment.

As Talley slept on his couch, the SWAT team used explosives to blow his front door clean off its hinges, sending it flying several feet across the room, where it landed on Talley. Anyone sitting near the door would have been severely injured. An eleven-member SWAT team then piled in, one member with his gun trained on Talley.

After the search, one of the raiding officers noticed that Talley’s security system had a camera inside the door as well as outside. “They got real excited about that,” he told me. The same officer asked if they could watch the raid on the monitor. They then watched the footage over and over, laughing and marveling at what they had just put Talley through (there’s video of this too). A few recorded the footage on their cell phones. One said, “That was worth coming to work for.”

They didn’t find any illicit drugs. But they cuffed and arrested Talley anyway. He was later released.

In 84 of the 105 warrants, the suspect was Black. As a city, Little Rock is 42 percent Black.

perhaps the most recent well-known example of Hudson’s collateral damage—and the one that has generated the most outrage—is Breonna Taylor. Just after midnight on March 13, 2020, three plainclothes Louisville narcotics officers forced their way into the home of Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old Black woman who worked as an emergency room technician. As they did, Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker, a legal gun owner with a concealed carry license, awoke and grabbed his gun. Taylor also woke up and walked into the hallway outside her bedroom. According to the police, as the battering ram forced open the door, Walker fired at them, striking one officer in the leg. The police returned with a storm of at least twenty bullets, striking Taylor eight times, killing her. One officer, Brett Hankison, walked back to the sidewalk and began firing indiscriminately into a shaded window. A pregnant woman lived next to Taylor with her young son. Police bullets struck objects in her living room, dining room, kitchen, and hallway. One shattered her glass patio door. Another whizzed by inches from the head of a guest in her home.

Kenneth Walker was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of a police officer. But those charges were quickly dismissed.

The Louisville police didn’t find any drugs or cash in the apartment. We now know their main suspect, Jamarcus Glover, and his accomplices were already in custody by the time the police raided Taylor’s home.

In the affidavit for the no-knock warrant for Taylor’s home, a detective claimed to have consulted with a postal inspector, who confirmed that Glover had been receiving packages at Taylor’s address. The postal inspector has since said that he was never consulted by the officers, and that there was nothing suspicious about the packages.

They had come from Amazon. A source with knowledge of the case told me that the packages c...

The police officers eventually took Floyd to the ground, and Derek Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck. It remained there for seven minutes and forty-six seconds, including for two minutes after Floyd was unconscious and had no pulse.

Onlookers, and even one of Chauvin’s colleagues, pleaded with him to relent. He didn’t, and Floyd died.

In 2017, the Daily Caller and Fox Nation published a montage of cars plowing into protesters set to the song “Move Bitch” by Ludacris. An editor for the right-wing Daily Caller tweeted, “I wonder how many protesters I could run over before I got arrested.”

The psychologists Clifford Stott and Steven Reicher have studied the 2011 London riots in response to a police shooting, the 2019 protests and riots in Hong Kong, and riots related to soccer hooliganism in the 1990s. Their research has found that despite the disparate motivations of these groups, the vast majority of participants behaved rationally and engaged in self-policing to keep rowdier members from instigating violence. This remained true even when rogue actors got into altercations with police. But as soon as the police were perceived to have engaged in illegitimate violence—when they attacked people who did nothing wrong—the police became the common enemy of the entire group, and more widespread violence followed.

When someone shot up and then set fire to a Minneapolis police station early in the summer, for example, blame was quickly cast on protesters. An investigation months later showed the station had been attacked by the Boogaloo Bois, an “accelerationist” group whose objective is to start a second civil war.

Vice President Mike Pence cited the latter incident during his Republican National Convention acceptance speech, leaving the clear implication that the crime was committed by racial justice protesters.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis introduced an “anti-mob” bill that would expand the state’s Stand Your Ground law,

allowing people to shoot protesters suspected of looting or “criminal mischief” that disrupts a business.

DC National Guard officers who had been assigned to the protest spoke out about what they saw. “As a military officer, what I saw was more or less really fucked up,” one Guardsman told Politico. “The crowd was loud but peaceful, and at no point did I feel in danger, and I was standing right there in the front of the line. A lot of us are still struggling to process this, but in a lot of ways, I believe I saw civil rights being violated in order for a photo op.” Another Guardsman added, “I’ve been tear gassed before. I was there the night before when we got tear gassed, [and] there was tear gas there.” Another said she felt more compelled to defend the protesters from the police than the other way around.

DeMarco too said that the protests weren’t violent. “Having served in a combat zone, and understanding how to assess threat environments, at no time did I feel threatened by the protestors or assess them to be violent,” he said.

“Our fellow American citizens were engaged in the peaceful expression of their First Amendment rights. Yet they were subjected to an unprovoked escalation and excessive use of force.”

Trump was endorsed by nearly every official police union in the country.

Trump’s most enduring legacy may be to have generated support for police reform. His response to the protesters was so dismissive and his attempts to quash them so aggressive, he actually moved public opinion on policing in a way Watts, Rodney King, Ferguson, and other milestone events couldn’t. According to a Washington Post poll, after the Lafayette Park incident, support for the protests shot up to 74 percent, including 53 percent of Republicans, and 61 percent disapproved of how Trump handled the demonstrations. The percentage who said they believed police killings were indicative of more systemic problems hit 69 percent, up 26 points since Ferguson.

Other polls showed huge jumps in the percentage of Americans who believe Blacks are treated unfairly by police and are in favor of reform policies like abolishing chokeholds and no-knock raids.

An August poll by Gallup found that confidence in police had dropped below 50 percent for the firs...