Trump Wants To Revive the Militarization of Police

The White House may be setting us up for a new wave of police abuses—and necessary calls for reform.

In recent years, American public opinion about police has swung wildly from strong support for law enforcement, to serious calls for reform in the wake of high-profile cases of police brutality and killings by officers, back to rising confidence in police. Unfortunately, as public faith in policing rebounds from its 2020 low, so has politicians' interest in reinforcing policies that fueled popular interest in change to begin with. Specifically, the Trump administration wants to revive the controversial practice of militarizing civilian police forces.

Military and National Security Assets To Assist Law Enforcement

"Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement," President Donald Trump wrote in an April 28 executive order. "Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime."

In assigning "military and national security assets" to local law enforcement, the Trump administration is returning to a controversial policy of training and equipping cops like soldiers. Over the years, supplying police with military vehicles, equipment, weapons, and training has led too many law enforcement officers to behave more like occupying troops than like civilian keepers of the peace.

'The Mindset of the Soldier is Simply Not Appropriate for the Civilian Police Officer'

"Over the past 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment, and training to civilian police. That encouragement has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American law enforcement," Diane Cecelie Weber wrote in a Cato Institute briefing paper in 1999. "The sharing of training and technology is producing a shared mindset. The problem is that the mindset of the soldier is simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer. Police officers confront not an 'enemy' but individuals who are protected by the Bill of Rights."

Almost a decade later, the situation was no better.

"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," Radley Balko, then of Reason, told the House Subcommittee on Crime in 2007. "Academic criminologists credit these transfers with the dramatic rise in paramilitary SWAT teams over the last quarter century" and the resulting "1,500 percent increase in the use of SWAT teams in this country from the early 80s until the early 2000s."

Balko later literally wrote the book on the subject: 2014's Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces.

Militarization of the police, and the resulting treatment of the American public less as people to be defended than as a subject population, directly led to many of the abuses that sparked widespread revulsion and calls for reform. That culminated in the protests-turned-riots of 2020.

From Support for Police to Calls for Reform, and Back Again

"About half of American adults believe police violence against the public is a 'very' or 'extremely' serious problem," the AP reported of polling in July 2020. "Only about a third said the same as recently as last September, as well as in July 2015, just a few months after Freddie Gray, a Black man, died in police custody in Baltimore."

That same summer, Reuters–Ipsos polling found strong support across political divides for reforms including bans on the use of chokeholds by police, requiring officers to wear body cameras, and making police "give the people they stop their name, badge number and reason for the stop." That poll and one from Pew Research found overwhelming majorities in favor of "permitting citizens to sue police officers in order to hold them accountable for misconduct or using excessive force."

But Trump's order would also indemnify "law enforcement officers who unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law."

Of course, Trump issued his executive order as confidence in police is on the rise, surging from 43 percent to 51 percent just from 2023 to 2024, according to Gallup. Police favorability has also taken off after the public dealt with a pandemic-era surge in crime that many attributed to police demoralized by the reform movement and prosecutors disinterested in punishing criminals.

Progressive prosecutors were blamed by the public—accurately in some cases—for winning office with calls for reform but then ignoring property crimes and neglecting their responsibility to maintain order. Support for police reform quickly eroded. Voters turned out a few of the more prominent figures, like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco and George Gascon in Los Angeles, and replaced them with candidates who offered a more traditional approach. By promising in the executive order to "prioritize prosecution" of local officials who "willfully and unlawfully direct the obstruction of criminal law" Trump effectively threatens to criminalize different criminal justice policies that local voters might experiment with—and reject of their own accord if disappointed with the results.

Lockdowns, Not Criminal Justice Policy, Fueled Crime

That's a mistake because research finds the crime surge was a result of foolish public health policies during COVID-19 that put people out of work and idled young men. Lockdowns bred disorder.

"The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas," Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris wrote in a research review for the Brookings Institution. "Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average."

Whatever the failings of progressive prosecutors and the potential for demoralizing cops with criticism, crime surged primarily because politicians abused power by confining people to their homes, shuttering businesses, prohibiting normal social contact, and locking down schools. Criminal justice policy may have played a role, but public health power wielded as a hammer against people's liberty was the real culprit.

By reviving the discredited practice of equipping and training police like an army of occupation in their own homeland, the Trump administration may fuel a new wave of abuses that will reinvigorate the public's distaste for abusive law enforcement and remind people of the need for real reform.