From Badges to Battles: Police Militarization in America

by Kristine Mar, Brown Political Review
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On August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a young, unarmed black man named Michael Brown was shot and killed by an on-duty police officer. While it’s a story that’s been told over and over this last month, it is also a story that’s been familiar for decades, repeated countless times, with different names and in different places. The story is about James Boyd in Albuquerque, Manuel Diaz in Anaheim, Oscar Grant III in Oakland, Sean Bell in New York City and many more — all men, often minorities, who were shot and killed by officers ordered to protect and serve.

While the case of each death is unique and the story is shaped by the victim’s family, police departments and the media, what these deaths have most in common is their aftermath. All have been followed by civilian protests and police responses. In 2006, more than 200 protesters were arrested in New York City in reaction to the Bell shooting; a few years later, peaceful protests and riots followed Grant’s shooting and subsequent trial. The day after Diaz’s death — the fifth shooting by the Anaheim police in 2012 — the police killed Joel Acevedo, resulting in increased protestor presence matched by increased paramilitary police deployment. James Boyd’s death this March was also followed by another death a week later when Albuquerque police shot Alfred Redwine and confronted ensuing demonstrations with riot gear and mounted officers. Yet, despite these cases’ differences, the tactics employed, including the use of armored tanks and stun grenades, were overwhelmingly similar: Citizens protesting police brutality were met with more of the same.

Since 1990, when the US Departments of Justice and Defense entered a formal partnership to jointly develop and share technology, the placement of military-grade weaponry into the hands of local law enforcement has grown astronomically. Under the 1033 Program, surplus equipment is passed down to state, county and local-level police departments, though no training or supervision is provided along with it. According to the Defense Logistics Agency, in 2013 nearly $450 million worth of equipment was transferred from the Pentagon to law enforcement. Ostensibly, this program was enacted so that police departments could fight the country’s two major wars: the war on terror and the war on drugs. Yet when the police are fighting wars, the very nature of their job changes. They are no longer peacekeepers, but soldiers.

Most alarmingly, the use of military style weaponry has spilled over from the war on drugs and war on terror into the civilian realm. Police are using military technology to respond to protests against police-caused deaths. Data on police action is rarely released to the public, making it hard to determine or conduct comparisons on the extent to which military grade equipment is used in civilian situations. There may be one indicator, however. In 1984, only 13 percent of mid-size towns and cities (25,000-50,000 inhabitants) employed SWAT teams; today, more than 80 percent do. SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics; SWAT teams consist of police armed with and trained to use military-grade weaponry. The funneling of military equipment to police forces has allowed even small towns like Ferguson to have SWAT teams. Furthermore, one of the provisions of the 1033 Program requires that Pentagon-donated equipment be used within one year or else returned. This provision might help explain the increased use of military grade equipment in civilian situations. In theory, this stipulation simply ensures the continued use of technology that the military has deemed outdated, but in practice it incentivizes law enforcement to respond to charges of non-violent crime with disproportionate displays of strength.

It is therefore unsurprising that the militarization of the police and the increase in SWAT teams, along with the provision compelling weapon use within one year of receiving it, has led not only to an increase in the number of SWAT teams but also in SWAT team deployments. The ACLUestimates that 79 percent of SWAT team deployments between 2011 and 2012 were used to serve search warrants, more than half of which were served to blacks and Latinos. Very rarely is such an extreme display of force necessary or even advisable for home drug searches, when inhabitants are usually unaware and unarmed. In the 1980s there were, on average, 3,000 raids involving SWAT teams every year; in 2005 that number had increased 100-fold to 300,000.

The 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests were among the first indicators of what has become a dangerous trend. On November 30, 1999 at least 40,000 demonstrators hit the streets of the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in opposition to economic globalization. Often known as the Battle of Seattle, both peaceful rallies and anarchist rioting was met with pepper spray and rubber bullets, hundreds of arrests and an imposed curfew. The backlash over law enforcement’s handling of the situation led to the resignation of the Seattle police chief a few months later.

Over the next decade, in order to prevent similar chaos and destruction, law enforcement agencies overwhelmingly turned to the use of prevention policies, which has seemingly come to mean intimidation. From 2000 on, political conventions have been designated “National Special Security Events” by the Department of Homeland Security and been the sites of increased police presence. During the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver the size of the police department doubled. The Republican National Convention, held the same year in Saint Paul, saw the arrests of more than 40 journalists. FBI documents on the Occupy movement classified it as a potential criminal threat and delineated counterterrorism procedures to coordinate with local law enforcement in response. The Ferguson protests included the heavy use of tear gas, guns pointed at demonstrators and a governor-instated curfew. Over the past 15 years policing tactics have changed from crowd control and lawful arrests to suppression and dispersion.

The preponderance of full-time SWAT teams and stations filled with machine guns, camouflage and gun-silencers has led to increased deployment of militarized police units in situations where the resulting atmosphere of fear is more likely to escalate violence than to reduce it. If the unrest that has followed shootings around the country — in Ferguson, Albuquerque, Oakland and New York — is any testament, officers clad in armor so that they look more like violent video game characters than members of the community keeping the peace, and agencies that work harder to obfuscate their actions than to communicate with the public, results in even less respect for the law. Rather than attempts to generate submission, active interaction and cooperation between law enforcement and civilians should be the goal.

The aftermath of Ferguson includes a $40 million civil rights lawsuit and an investigation of Darren Wilson, the Ferguson Police Department officer who shot Brown. Meanwhile, three more deaths have surrounded Michael Brown’s: Eric Garner in Staten Island on July 17, John Crawford in Ohio on August 5, and Ezell Ford in Los Angeles on August 11. While the White House has proposed a reevaluation of the 1033 Program, and increases in transparency and accountability seem promising, rebuilding trust in law enforcement will take much more time.

The effects of police militarization extend beyond the everyday use of SWAT teams to serve search warrants, beyond the common use of lethal force by untrained professionals and beyond the suppression of First Amendment protest rights. It creates distrust of those who are meant to keep the peace and it contributes to a society where Michael Brown’s name is just another in an already too-long list of others.