The subject of police militarization has come up with increasing frequency over the past few years, and the troubling trend of police officers who act more like an occupying army than law enforcement continues.
Radley Balko has devoted a large part of his career to pointing out how the use of federal dollars to beef up paramilitary police units nationwide has led to a long list of deaths, innocent people under arrest, and worse. His essay “Overkill” is an excellent synopsis of the current state of the use of SWAT teams in ways that seem to run counter to the idea of police being a part of the solution.
In the latest installment of his podcast, Common Sense, Dan Carlin does an excellent job of laying out the problem, how we got to where we are, and its roots in the war on drugs. I suggest you give it a listen.
Blackfive brings up the subject of Marine units that are expressly trained and organized to supplement and train civilian police. This troubles me because, as he points out, all it would take is the stroke of a pen to put them on the streets of America in a way that doesn’t violate Posse Comitatus.
Heck, even podcasts of just a bunch of friends getting together to shoot the breeze for a few hours have discussed the subject.
One thing that hasn’t been brought up in all these discussions recently occurred to me. All of these discussions talk about SWAT raids to arrest drug suspects or deliver no-knock warrants to look for evidence, but no-one talks about the judges who take part in the process that makes them possible. Would it make sense to make efforts to convince the judges that authorize no-knock search warrants that their use is detrimental to our society and system of justice? There have to be professional organizations for those who sit on the bench. Could outreach to these organizations be a good step in finding a way to cut down on the overuse of paramilitary tactics and equipment to go after non-violent offenders? A lot of the judges in this country are elected, and advertisements during an election cycle that bring to light the judges’ involvement in the death of citizens when police use overly aggressive tactics or make mistakes that lead to tragedy might get them to re-evaluate their cooperation when the police come asking for a no-knock warrant.
What do y’all think?
DaddyBear’s Den 
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/ September 26, 2012I’ve been wondering about how to curtail the militarization of police in the war on drugs, too. I like your idea of focusing on judges who must face re-election. Changing policies may be much easier to achieve at the local level, as the citizenry are likely to be well aware of abuses in their own cities and therefore easier to arouse.
My own thoughts have focused on demanding action from the US Congress. They are, after all, providing all that fancy equipment to state and local law enforcement for their anti-terrorism and drug war efforts. They also fund the operations of bureaucratic SWAT teams, including the State Department, Department of Education, Department of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Park Service. All of these groups, at all levels of government, have gone hog wild over their new toys and, not surprisingly, have acquired attitudes toward We the People that, to them, justify their use of excessive force. (Remember those psychology experiments with college students pretending to be prison guards? And the little blue-eyed v brown-eyed children experiment? Both achieved shocking results in just a few days, even though participants knew it was all just pretend. How much worse are the results for LEOs who are being trained for duty?)
Congress could and should place restrictions on the use of this weaponry against the American people, just as they do for the US military operating in a theater of war. Here’s a link to a good article on that thought, and the URL alone tells you plenty:
http://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/2011/06/13/police-swat-teams-under-fewer-restrictions-than-troops-in-afghanistan/
Please excuse the way-tardy comment on this post. I only discovered your blog today, and I am enjoying a stroll through your archives.
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daddybear71
/ September 26, 2012Welcome!
Excellent point about working on the federal government at the same time we work locally.
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