Our Militarized Police Departments

Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Crime

Radley Balko | July 2, 2007

Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to speak today.

I’m here to talk about police militarization, a troubling trend that’s been on the rise in America’s police departments over the last 25 years.

Militarization is a broad term that refers to using military-style weapons, tactics, training, uniforms, and even heavy equipment by civilian police departments.

It’s a troubling trend because the military has a very different and distinct role than our domestic peace officers. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. The police are supposed to protect us while upholding our constitutional rights. It’s dangerous to conflate the two.

But that’s exactly what we’re doing. Since the late 1980s, Mr. Chairman, thanks to acts passed by the U.S. Congress, millions of pieces of surplus military equipment have been given to local police departments across the country.

We’re not talking just about computers and office equipment. Military-grade semi-automatic weapons, armored personnel vehicles, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and all manner of other equipment designed for use on the battlefield is now being used on American streets, against American citizens.

Academic criminologists credit these transfers with the dramatic rise in paramilitary SWAT teams over the last quarter century.

SWAT teams were originally designed to be used in violent, emergency situations like hostage takings, acts of terrorism, or bank robberies. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, that’s primarily how they were used, and they performed marvelously.

But beginning in the early 1980s, they’ve been increasingly used for routine warrant service in drug cases and other nonviolent crimes. And thanks to the Pentagon transfer programs, there are now a lot more of them.

This is troubling because paramilitary police actions are extremely volatile, necessarily violent, overly confrontational, and leave very little margin for error. These are acceptable risks when you’re dealing with an already violent situation featuring a suspect who is an eminent threat to the community.

But when you’re dealing with nonviolent drug offenders, paramilitary police actions create violence instead of defusing it. Whether you’re an innocent family startled by a police invasion that inadvertently targeted the wrong home or a drug dealer who mistakes raiding police officers for a rival drug dealer, forced entry into someone’s home creates confrontation. It rouses the basest, most fundamental instincts we have in us – those of self-preservation – to fight when flight isn’t an option.

Peter Kraska, a criminologist at the University of Eastern Kentucky, estimates we’ve seen a startling 1,500 percent increase in the use of SWAT teams in this country from the early 80s until the early 2000s. And the vast majority of these SWAT raids are for routine warrant service.

These violent raids on American homes, when coupled with the imperfect, often ugly methods used in drug policing, have set the stage for disturbingly frequent cases of police raiding the homes not only of recreational, nonviolent drug users, but the homes of people completely innocent of any crime at all.

Take a look at the map on the monitor (http://www.cato.org/raidmap). This is a map of the botched paramilitary police raids I found while researching a paper for the Cato Institute last summer. It is by no means inclusive. It only includes those cases for which I was able to find a newspaper account or court record. Based on my research, I’m convinced that the vast majority of victims of mistaken raids are to afraid, intimidated, embarrassed, or concerned about retaliation to report what happened to them.

Pay particular attention to the red markers on the map. Those are the approximately 40 cases where a mistaken raid resulted in the death of a completely innocent American citizen.

Comments

Pingback| 1.20.10 @ 4:56PM

Policing in New Zealand « Brad Taylor’s Blog links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…of the dead tree version – has the headline “Armed police brought in to arrest man in Christchurch.” This obviously wouldn’t be newsworthy in United States or other countries with highly militarized police forces.  American officers routinely carry pistols and, if TV shows like Cops are any indication, are willing to get them out at every opportunity. Down here, the police don’t carry firearms and the…

Pingback| 4.15.10 @ 6:03PM

4-16-10: The Militarization of Policing « Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…more than one per day. There were 806 total in Maryland, over four per day. Sheilah talks to Radley Balko, a senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason, about what he sees as the “ militarization of policing.” Also joining the conversation is Baltimore Police Department Chief of Public Affairs Anthony Guglielmi. On Tuesday, we extended an invitation to three other police departments. Anne…

badboy|5.24.11 @ 3:25AM|#

Adult High Definition Videos

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|7.17.11 @ 1:41AM|#

can you shout POLICE STATE?

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