Is the US finally doing something about warrior cops?
The military gear is being confiscated and Ferguson police are promising to play nice
By Meagan Day
Every fall, police departments from around the nation gather at Urban Shield. A joint venture of Homeland Security and the private arms sector, Urban Shield is a weapons expo, tactical training boot camp and cosplay convention rolled into one.
Cops from cities like Boise, Austin and St. Paul receive training from the Israeli Defense Forces. They test-drive armored vans that double as bulldozers. They try out the kinds of semi-automatic weapons once reserved for the military that are now typical of basic squad cars.
Vendors show off state-of-the-art technologies, like a device that allows the operator to strap a camera on a dog’s back and maneuver the animal via remote-controlled vibrations, or an all-terrain robot intended for “desert and mountain combat situations.” One new weapon scrambles the ocular fluid, causing temporary blindness — the vendor suggested that it would be useful for breaking up bar fights.
What seems like a dorky indulgence in police vanity has real-world consequences, since departments actually purchase the military-grade equipment. Much of the gear will never come in handy on a normal police mission, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be used on American civilians.
Urban Shield was started in 2007 to meet the needs and desires of an increasingly militarized police force. But the rise of so-called “warrior cop” didn’t enter into the national conversation until 2014, when people across the nation tuned in to live coverage of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri.
What they saw alarmed them. Police were outfitted with gear fit for the battlefield, making Ferguson look like Fallujah. Since when did municipal and state police dress like soldiers? Why were cops treating unarmed citizens like enemy combatants? And where did they get all that elaborate war machinery to begin with?
In response to nationwide outrage after Ferguson, President Obama ordered a review of the federal program that supplies military gear to police departments. His administration ultimately decided that some of it needed to be recalled from local police, a process that is now underway, much to some law enforcement officers’ dismay.
Ferguson wasn’t an anomaly. It was merely a very public display of the aggressive policing tactics that have crept into law enforcement strategy in the last three decades — and have primarily been used in poor urban black and brown communities, out of the media spotlight.
“If anything positive can come from the Ferguson travesties,” wrote the prominent journalist Glenn Greenwald, “it is that the completely out-of-control orgy of domestic police militarization receives long-overdue attention and reining in.”
President George H.W. Bush kicked off the robocop transformation in 1989 when he doubled the amount of federal money allocated to local law enforcement as part of an effort to appear tough on urban crime, especially the drug trade. The next summer, Massachusetts police flew army helicopters above a Grateful Dead show in order to identify dealers.
Raids on potential stash houses quickly became the anti-drug policing tactic du jour. The cops who conducted them were increasingly outfitted in expensive, intimidating and unnecessary gear straight out of Desert Storm. This era saw the rise of SWAT teams, whose members are trained to behave like Navy SEALs in Afghanistan, but are deployed in public housing units in Baltimore and Detroit.
As lawmakers competed to see who could be the toughest on urban drug crime, police departments continued receiving massive injections of cash and swag. In 1997, Congress created the 1033 program, which allowed the military to transfer equipment to civilian law enforcement agencies. Since then, more than $4 billion worth of war machinery has gone to law enforcement agencies around the country. That’s the program that the Obama administration is currently attempting to rein in.
In the ’90s, drugs were the rationale for cops roaming the streets of Oakland and Atlanta dressed like modern gladiators. That rationale changed on September 11, 2001 — suddenly every city was in need of a local army in case terrorism hit home. Preparedness was the new buzzword, and it continues to justify the acquisition of armored tanks, sniper rifles, bayonets, 3D printed drones and whatever else is hot in the arms industry.
Terrorist attacks don’t happen very often on American soil. But if you have the equipment, and you’ve been trained to use it, why let it gather dust? That logic results in police bringing unnecessary and dangerous equipment with them on missions inside American neighborhoods.
The ACLU reports that police paramilitary practices are disproportionately used on people of color — which is not surprising, since all policing disproportionately affects people of color. The paramilitary kind just happens to involve battering rams and grenade launchers.
After three decades of increasing militarization, there’s been a change not just in police vehicles but in police attitudes. “There’s no de-escalation chapter in the warrior book,” former SWAT commander Bill Micklus told Vice.
“Cuff and stuff” doesn’t work, Micklus explained, but some cops today — well-trained in the art of warfare, though not always in the art of communication — have a hard time envisioning alternatives. Officers are are often resistant to community policing, believing that their primary job is to “catch bad guys” rather than to protect civilians and keep the peace.
Obama’s effort to stem the tide of war technology flooding into police departments hints at the beginning of a domestic demilitarization plan — and that’s great. But an overhaul of the 1033 program is just the first step in fixing the warrior cop problem. Considering that the best-selling T-shirt at Urban Shield last year was emblazoned with “Black Rifles Matter” and a picture of an M16 semi-automatic weapon, we’re going to need a major police attitude adjustment.
The shift seems to be happening in the city that first brought these concerns to a wider American audience. The Ferguson police department, facing a host of lawsuits over its aggressive and discriminatory conduct, reached a deal January 27 with the US Justice Department to implement a community-oriented policing model. It’s promising to listen to civilian committees and neighborhood associations, prioritize community relations, and learn to de-escalate tense scenarios. Time will tell if it’s possible to teach an old warrior new tricks.
Want to deepen your understanding of the news?
Follow Timeline on Medium
