The racial unrest of 1967 led directly to the militarization of local police forces today
With Vietnam on the brain, departments across America armed up
In July of 1967, when African American cab driver John Smith was arrested and beaten by white police officers for allegedly driving in the wrong direction and using obscene language, a Newark already brittle with racial tension finally broke. News of the police brutality spread quickly, by both neighborhood word of mouth and through the radio chatter of other African-American cab drivers, and people took to the streets to protest the pattern of official discriminatory violence that seemed to have the blessing of then-mayor Hugh Addonzio. Whatever chance there might have been for a peaceful resolution of the friction completely evaporated when the National Guard was called in to suppress the demonstrations. Violent clashes with the Guard rocked Newark for five straight days. When something a calm finally settled again over the city, there were 26 dead and hundreds more injured.
Something similar happened in Detroit a couple weeks later when undercover police raided an unlicensed bar hosting a welcome home for returning Vietnam War veterans. President Johnson signed an Executive order bringing federal troops into the city and the violence escalated. Detroit was even worse than Newark, however, with over 40 dead and nearly a thousand injured. And while it’s easy to see in these violent events of the summer of 1967 a molding of sadly familiar patterns, it’s important to note that something new was happening then that would only continue to intensify into the present: police work was being militarized.
The military had been used to perform police duties before, of course. During Reconstruction after the Civil War, Federal troops had occupied the American South in order to enforce civil rights. But the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act effectively ended Reconstruction when it barred federal troops from enforcing laws. But the Act doesn’t apply to National Guard troops, and so the Guard has been used frequently in the past to quell things like the 1894 Pullman car strike and in 1957 to enforce integration in public schools in Arkansas.
But the modern militarization of police forces — the porousness of the conceptual border between civilian law enforcement and military tactics and equipment — began in earnest as a response to rising racial tension in the 1960s. It was because of the Newark and Detroit riots that President Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. As political scientist David Schultz writes, “The Act created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which made available grants to local governments to develop and purchase military-type resources to suppress the riots. The money facilitated the development of SWAT and other heavily armored police forces which had developed in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities to counteract so-called black insurgency.”
But police militarization is about more than the ability to spend money on military equipment. It’s also about using military tactics on civilian populations. It’s important to remember that this was all happening at the same time as the escalation of the Vietnam war, and so not only was military equipment being mass-produced and made easily procurable, but anti-guerrilla military strategies were also becoming popularized among a police force that more and more saw itself as a paramilitary organization. Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates wrote that “[W]e began reading everything we could get our hands on concerning guerrilla warfare. We watched with interest what was happening in Vietnam.” The military itself also came to see minority populations within the United States itself as a sort of test populations for their own nascent counterinsurgency techniques. Historian Joan Jensen writes in her 1991 book Army Surveillance in America, 1775–1980 that the Army sent a contingent of plainclothes officers “to develop counterinsurgency information on black communities similar to that collected on Vietnamese guerrilla organizations.” There was an open door between the military and civilian police worlds, and it was swinging both ways.
Militarization of the police continued unabated, of course, through the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s. Nixon and Reagan’s war on drugs kept up the pretense of an embattled country that required an internal, domestic army to protect it from itself, in the form of heavily armed local police departments. The racial overtones in this “war” remained obvious. But the war on drugs also emphasized civil forfeiture, the police confiscation of property allegedly used in crimes, which of course created a material incentive for those very same departments to keep the war hot. Upheld by the Supreme Court in a 1996, civil forfeiture would allow police departments to finance buying even more exotic military equipment to use on American civilians, almost always of color.
After 9/11 the so-called “war on terror” provided yet another new bevy of military equipment and tactics for police departments to use against American citizens. The passing of the Patriot Act into law provided further grounds for police departments to treat civilians as a foreign enemy within its own borders, giving broad legal cover for police to conduct all types of surveillance (such as reading emails and texts and requesting records of library books) which would have previously been unheard of. And then there’s all of the new military-grade weapons. Frances Weaver writes, “Many small-town police departments now boast the same weaponry once wielded by U.S. military units in Afghanistan — including tanks with 360-degree rotating turrets, battering rams, and automatic weapons. Those weapons are today deployed against Americans suspected of crimes in their own homes.”
According to the American Civil Liberties Union report “War Comes Home,” federal and state programs continue to “unnecessarily and dangerously” militarize local police departments, “the battlegrounds of which have disproportionately been in communities of color.” It’s a trend that started in full force 50 years ago this summer, as an overheated and wrongheaded response to communities in Newark and Detroit and many other American cities. The most cogent irony being that the riots were in response to police brutality and overreach in the first place. More guns and hyper-militarized SWAT tactics were always only going to exacerbate the problem and leave the root issues of inequality and government indifference unaddressed.
