Don’t Turn Cops Into Red Lobsters

Matthew Feeney
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

In a 2015 executive order President Obama limited the military equipment available to police departments. Today, President Trump lifted that revoked executive order with one of his own, thereby allowing tools and equipment such as large caliber weapons, tracked armored personnel carriers, bayonets, grenade launchers, and camouflage uniforms to yet again make their way from foreign battlefields to American streets. This development will worsen the disastrous police militarization trend seen over the second half of the last century.

By User:Fiatswat800 — Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19987527

My colleagues at the Cato Institute have been outlining the dangers associated with police being outfitted with military gear since before the display of force seen in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. This work highlights that in the 1980s there were only a few thousand Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) raids a year but that by 2001 there were an estimated 40,000 SWAT raids a year. Such raids frequently involve police in battle fatigues with Kevlar helmets, boot knives, and “military-grade weapons, such as the Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun” barging into people’s homes at night with battering rams. These military-style raids, which are often used to execute drug-related warrants, can be deadly for the terrified occupants (including dogs). Not only are these raids dangerous, they are also an affront to the Constitution. Today when announcing the revised policy Attorney General Jeff Sessions described such concerns as “superficial.”

I have nothing substantial to add to the Cato Institute’s large body of work on police militarization insofar as it documents and explains a trend that should be strongly resisted. Rather, I’d like to remind readers that concerns about police officers acting like soldiers are not new. In fact, not long after the founding of the first modern police force officers were accused of being soldiers in waiting.

In 1829 British Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel established London’s Metropolitan Police Force, the first modern police department. Officers in this force came to be referred to as “Peelers,” and today it’s not uncommon to hear English police referred to as “bobbies,” a less direct reference to the father of modern policing.

An 1850s PeelerBy Unknown — Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8973524

Officers with London’s Metropolitan Police Force wore blue uniforms. The color blue was chosen to distinguish the officers from British soldiers, known as “redcoats.” And yet, not everyone was convinced that this new law enforcement organization would be distinct from the military. After all, the Peterloo Massacre, in which a cavalry charge killed between 10 and 20 peaceful political campaigners and injured hundreds more in Manchester, had occurred only ten years before the establishment of London’s new police force.

George Cruikshank’s depiction of the Peterloo Massacre

London’s early police officers were sometimes derogatorily referred to as “raw lobsters.” They were so called because, like lobsters, officers in blue (the color of raw lobsters) could quickly turn red (the color of soldiers and cooked lobsters) if put in hot water.

In his book Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts, Clive Bloom mentions that the new police force was opposed by working class radicals as well as conservative traditionalists.

Bloom notes two handbills from 1830 to illustrate objections to the new police officers. One called for the arming of the people in opposition to the un-English and unconstitutional police force. Another, read by Peel himself in the House of Commons, denounced “Peel’s Bloody Gang” and “These damned Police”:

Liberty or Death, Englishmen! Britons! And Honest Men!!! The time has at length arrived. All London meets on Tuesday. Come Armed. We assure you from ocular demonstration that 6,000 cutlasses have been removed from the Tower, for the use of Peel’s Bloody Gang […] These damned Police are now to be armed. Englishmen, will you put up with this?

“Reviewing the blue devils, alias the raw lobsters, alias the bludgeon men” — estimated 1834–35. From The Political Drama For more information visit: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/reviewing-the-blue-devils-alias-the-raw-lobsters-alias-the-bludgeon-men-from-the-political-drama

Police are now a staple of British as well as American society, but when introduced to London they were hardly universally accepted, and there was concern that the new men in blue could turn into a military force should the appropriate “hot water” arrive.

In the United States, the militarization of police over the last few decades has embodied the concerns Londoners expressed in the 19th century, with police forces looking increasing like military units rather than a law enforcement agencies. The “hot water” of equipping police with military gear combined with the disastrous war on drugs has been turning America’s police from blue to red. This was perhaps most recently highlighted by the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which prompted a countrywide discussion about police practices and accountability.

Sharpshooter, with weapon trained, atop a SWAT vehicle by Jamelle Bouie

In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, President Obama signed the executive order scrapped by President Trump. Obama’s executive order hardly put an end to police militarization, but it was nonetheless a step in the right direction. Today’s executive order is the latest sign of the current administration’s criminal justice regressions. Concerns about police officers morphing into soldiers are serious, well-founded, and as old as modern policing. It’s a shame that the current attorney general believes it’s appropriate to describe these concerns as “superficial.”

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