The intensive militarization of America's police forces is a serious menace about which a small number of people have been loudly warning for years, with little attention or traction. In a 2007 paper on "the blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement," the criminal justice professor Peter Kraska defined "police militarization" as "the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model."
The harrowing events of the last week in Ferguson, Missouri -- the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager, Mike Brown, and the blatantly excessive and thuggish response to ensuing community protests from a police force that resembles an occupying army -- have shocked the U.S. media class and millions of Americans. But none of this is aberrational.
It is the destructive by-product of several decades of deliberate militarization of American policing, a trend that received a sustained (and ongoing) steroid injection in the form of a still-flowing, post-9/11 federal funding bonanza, all justified in the name of "homeland security." This has resulted in a domestic police force that looks, thinks, and acts more like an invading and occupying military than a community-based force to protect the public.
As is true for most issues of excessive and abusive policing, police militarization is overwhelmingly and disproportionately directed at minorities and poor communities, ensuring that the problem largely festers in the dark. Americans are now so accustomed to seeing police officers decked in camouflage and Robocop-style costumes, riding in armored vehicles and carrying automatic weapons first introduced during the U.S. occupation of Baghdad, that it has become normalized. But those who bear the brunt of this transformation are those who lack loud megaphones; their complaints of the inevitable and severe abuse that results have largely been met with indifference.
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If anything positive can come from the Ferguson travesties, it is that the completely out-of-control orgy of domestic police militarization receives long-overdue attention and reining in.
Last night, two reporters, The Washington Post's Wesley Lowery and The Huffington Post's Ryan Reilly, were arrested and assaulted while working from a McDonald's in Ferguson. The arrests were arbitrary and abusive, and received substantial attention -- only because of their prominent platforms, not, as they both quickly pointed out upon being released, because there was anything unusual about this police behavior.
Reilly, on Facebook, recounted how he was arrested by "a Saint Louis County police officer in full riot gear, who refused to identify himself despite my repeated requests, purposefully banged my head against the window on the way out and sarcastically apologized." He wrote: "I'm fine. But if this is the way these officers treat a white reporter working on a laptop who moved a little too slowly for their liking, I can't imagine how horribly they treat others." He added: "And if anyone thinks that the militarization of our police force isn't a huge issue in this country, I've got a story to tell you."
Lowery, who is African-American, tweeted a summary of an interview he gave on MSNBC: "If I didn't work for the Washington Post and were just another Black man in Ferguson, I'd still be in a cell now." He added: "I knew I was going to be fine. But the thing is, so many people here in Ferguson don't have as many Twitter followers as I have and don't have Jeff Bezos or whoever to call and bail them out of jail."
The best and most comprehensive account of the dangers of police militarization is the 2013 book by the libertarian Washington Post journalist Radley Balko, entitled "Rise of the Warrior Cops: The Militarization of America's Police Forces." Balko, who has devoted his career to documenting and battling the worst abuses of the U.S. criminal justice system, traces the history and underlying mentality that has given rise to all of this: the "law-and-order" obsessions that grew out of the social instability of the 1960s, the War on Drugs that has made law enforcement agencies view Americans as an enemy population, the Reagan-era "War on Poverty" (which was more aptly described as a war on America's poor), the aggressive Clinton-era expansions of domestic policing, all topped off by the massively funded, rights-destroying, post-9/11 security state of the Bush and Obama years. All of this, he documents, has infused America's police forces with "a creeping battlefield mentality."
I read Balko's book prior to publication in order to blurb it, and after I was done, immediately wrote what struck me most about it: "There is no vital trend in American society more overlooked than the militarization of our domestic police forces." The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim, in the outlet's official statement about Reilly's arrest, made the same point: "Police militarization has been among the most consequential and unnoticed developments of our time."
In June, the ACLU published a crucial 96-page report on this problem, entitled "War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing." Its central point: "the United States today has become excessively militarized, mainly through federal programs that create incentives for state and local police to use unnecessarily aggressive weapons and tactics designed for the battlefield."
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