Today's post includes an in-depth interview with Shane at the pro-legalization website and blog Cheap Home Grow (cheaphomegrow.com); check it out from right here
Chapter Five
This Is What A Police State Looks Like
For nearly half a century, America’s police forces have undergone a
process of militarization. They've upped their cache of assault weapons
and military defense gear, increasingly deployed SWAT teams to conduct
ops-style missions on civilians, and cultivated a warrior attitude
within their rank. While major metropolitan areas have maintained SWAT
teams for decades, by the mid 2000s, 80 percent of small towns also had
their own paramilitary forces. But,
beyond deep reporting of individual journalists and scholars, little is
known about the extent of police militarization across the country. The
ACLU has attempted to bridge that knowledge gap with a fairly recent
report called “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American
Policing.” Below are some of its most significant findings:
1). The federal government’s war on drugs is the single greatest catalyst for local police militarization.
Far from being used for emergencies such as hostage situations, the
ACLU found that 62% of all SWAT deployments were for the purpose of drug
searches, and 79% were to search a person’s home with or without a
search warrant — usually for drugs. These deployments are invariably
violent and feature bands of heavily armed officers ramming down doors
or chucking 'flash bang' grenades into people's homes. Innocent people
are often caught up, and sometimes killed, in the ensuing chaos.
Examples of this include Eurie Stamp, a Massachusetts grandfather who
was shot dead by an officer as police attempted to locate Stamp’s
girlfriend’s son for a drug offense. Other SWAT-induced tragedies
abound: The ACLU has found that dozens of people were killed or injured
as a result of paramilitary deployment. For decades, the federal
government — in its quixotic quest to eliminate drug use — has abetted
these aggressive tactics with programs that create incentives for
militarization. One is called the 1033 program, which was launched in
the 1980’s to create a pipeline for military equipment between the
Department of Defense and local law enforcement. There are few
limitations or requirements imposed on agencies that participate in the
1033 Program. In addition, equipment transferred under the 1033 Program
is free to receiving agencies, though they are required to pay for
transport and maintenance. The federal government requires agencies that
receive 1033 equipment to use it within one year of receipt. Equally to
blame is the federal Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant
(JAG) program, another 80’s artifact that gives local police forces
incentives to seek out low-level drug offenders in exchange for grant
money. US Attorney General Eric Holder has called for the need to ensure
that the police have the trust of the community, and it has the
potential to do some really good work. But I am concerned that if the
Justice Department continues to grant money to local police departments,
money they use to engage in paramilitary weapons and tactics, the
Attorney Generals’ good work will be undermined.
2). Militarization is occurring with almost no oversight There
is virtually no oversight for SWAT deployment at the state level,
meaning no agency or governing body tracks how, and for what purposes,
SWAT teams are dispatched. There are few exceptions. Maryland passed a
law mandating the state to track SWAT deployment after the mayor of a
small municipality had his home raided, but that law is unlikely to be
renewed this year. The Utah state legislature recently agreed on a bill
to track SWAT deployment and is currently going forward with
implementing the law. Local agencies usually engaged in after-action
reports of SWAT use, but the ACLU found these reports were “woefully
incomplete.” The ACLU also discovered there are no uniform standards for
deploying SWAT teams. Discretion ultimately rests with police officers
themselves.
3). Non-whites are more likely to be targeted by SWAT deployments.
It should come as no surprise that the people most persecuted by police
in their communities are also more likely to have their front doors
bashed down by a police battering ram. Many of the SWAT teams examined
by the ACLU “either do not record race information or record it
unsystematically.” Nevertheless, the report found that for all people
affected by a SWAT deployment, 37 percent were Black, 12 percent were
Latino, 19 were white, and race was unknown for the rest of the people
impacted. Racial disparities were even more pronounced when examining
the purpose for SWAT deployment. When SWAT was dispatched for drug
raids, 68 percent of the time their targets were Blacks or Latinos,
while targets were white only 38 percent of the time. Similarly, when
SWAT was dispatched with warrants to search homes, non-whites were
affected to a greater degree than whites. In contrast, nearly half of
those affected when SWAT was deployed for emergency situations (hostage,
barricade, or active shooter scenarios) were white, while only 23% were
non-white. Basically, non-whites were not only more likely to come into
contact with paramilitary police forces, but their contact was usually
prompted by drug searches rather than the sort of emergencies where you
may actually want police to show up.
4). Police are secretive about their use of SWAT Overall,
the ACLU report lacks the sort of robustness you might expect for a
definitive report on police militarization in America. This is largely
the fault of police agencies themselves, who denied nearly half of the
ACLU’s public records requests in part or in full, and who keep poor
records of their own SWAT use. Those difficulties seem to inform much of
the ACLU’s recommendations to local, state and federal officials. Above
all, the organization calls for a streamlined system of record keeping
for SWAT deployment and equipment procurement. No such system currently
exists. The ACLU also asks that standards for deployment be bolstered
and unified across precincts, and that federal programs incentivizing
militarization be weakened or dismantled outright.
How did we allow our law enforcement apparatus to descend into
militaristic chaos? Traditionally, the role of civilian police has been
to maintain the peace and safety of the community while upholding the
civil liberties of residents in their respective jurisdictions. In stark
contrast, the military soldier is an agent of war, trained to kill the
enemy. Clearly, the mission of the police officer is incompatible with
that of a soldier, so why is it that local police departments are
looking more and more like paramilitary units in a combat zone? The line
between military and civilian law enforcement has been drawn for good
reason, but following the drug war and more recently, the war on terror,
that line is inconspicuously eroding, a trend that appears to be
worsening by the year.
Originally called the Special Weapons Attack Team, the Special Weapons
and Tactics (SWAT) units were inspired by an incident in 1966, when an
armed man climbed to the top of the 32-story clock tower at the
University of Texas in Austin and fired randomly for 90 minutes,
shooting 46 people and killing 15, until two police officers got to the
top of the tower and killed him. This episode is said to have “shattered
the last myth of safety Americans enjoyed [and] was the final impetus
the chiefs of police needed” to form their own SWAT teams. Use of these
paramilitary units gradually increased throughout the 1970s, mostly in
urban settings. The introduction of paramilitary units in America laid
the foundation for the erosion of the barrier between police and
military, a trend which accelerated in the 1980s under President Reagan.
In 1981, Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement
Act, which amended Posse Comitatus by directing the military to give
local, state and federal law enforcement access to military equipment,
research and training for use in the drug war. Following the
authorization of domestic police and military cooperation, the 1980s saw
a series of additional congressional and presidential maneuvers that
blurred the line between soldier and police officer, ultimately
culminating in the passage of the National Defense Authorization
Security Act which created the Law Enforcement Support Program, an
agency tasked with accelerating the transfer of military equipment to
civilian police departments. Between 1995 and 1997 the Department of
Defense gave 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including 3,800
M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel
carriers to civilian police agencies across the country. Between January
1997 and October 1999 alone, LEAP facilitated the distribution of 3.4
million orders of Pentagon equipment to over 11,000 domestic police
agencies in all 50 states. By December 2005, that number increased to
17,000. The agreement authorized the transfer of federal military
technology to local police forces, essentially flooding civilian law
enforcement with surplus military gear previously reserved for use
during wartime. But this was only the beginning.
In 1997, Congress, not yet satisfied with the flow of military hardware
to local police, allocated $727 million worth of this equipment. Among
the hand-me-downs were 253 aircraft (including six- and seven-passenger
airplanes, and UH-60 Blackhawk and UH-1 Huey helicopters), 7,856 M-16
rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, and 1,161
pairs of night-vision goggles. The military surplus program and
paramilitary units feed off one another in a cyclical loop that has
caused an explosive growth in militarized crime control techniques. With
all the new high-tech military toys the federal government has been
funneling into local police departments, SWAT teams have inevitably
multiplied and spread across American cities and towns in both volume
and deployment frequency. Criminologist Peter Kraska found that the
frequency of SWAT operations soared from just 3,000 annual deployments
in the early 1980s to an astonishing 40,000 raids per year by 2001,
75-80 percent of which were used to deliver search warrants.
Then there are the effects of the war on terror, which sparked the
creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the
introduction of DHS grants to local police departments. These grants are
used to purchase policing equipment, although law enforcement is
investing in more than just bullet-proof vests and walkie-talkies. DHS
grants have led to a booming law enforcement industry that specifically
markets military-style weaponry to local police departments. If this
sounds familiar, that's because it is law enforcement's version of the
military-industrial-complex. By instituting public policies that
encouraged the collaboration of military and domestic policing, the US
government handed a massive and highly profitable clientele to private
suppliers of paramilitary gear. Following the breakdown of Posse
Comitatus in the 1980s and '90s, gun companies, perceiving a profitable
trend, began aggressively marketing automatic weapons to local police
departments, holding seminars, and sending out color brochures redolent
with ninja-style imagery. Private suppliers of military equipment
advertise a glorified version of military-style policing attire to local
police departments and SWAT teams. One such defense manufacturing
company, Heckler and Koch, epitomized this aggressive marketing tactic
with its slogan for the MP5 submachine gun, “From the Gulf War to the
Drug War — Battle Proven.”
The most widely used justification for the purchase of heavily armored
war machines is that violence against police officers has increased
exponentially, necessitating tanks for the protection of the men and
women who serve our communities. But examination of the FBI's annual
Uniform Crime Report, a database that tracks the number of law
enforcement officers killed and assaulted each year, reveals that this
is simply not true. According to the UCR, since 2000 an average yearly
toll of about 50 police officers have been killed in the line of duty,
the highest reaching 70 in 2001. So the notion that militarization is a
necessary reaction to a growth in violence against police officers is
absurd, considering that violent crime is trending downward. Others
argue these tanks are needed in case of a terrorist attack or a natural
disaster. But on September 11, 2001, I do not recall the NYPD
complaining that a lack of armored tanks was impeding its policing
efforts. And during the catastrophic tornado that tore through Joplin,
Missouri several years ago, heavily armored vehicles weren't present nor
were they needed to assist in the aftermath. The majority of
paramilitary drug raid proponents maintain that military-style law
enforcement is required to reduce the risk of potential violence, injury
and death to both police officers and innocents. The reality is that
SWAT team raids actually escalate provocation, usually resulting in
senseless violence in what would otherwise be a routine, nonviolent
police procedure. Just consider your reaction in the event of a SWAT
team breaking down your door in the middle of night, possibly even
blowing off the hinges with explosives, while you and your family are
asleep. Imagine the terror of waking up to find complete strangers
forcing their way into your home and detonating a flash-bang grenade,
meant to disorient you. Assuming nobody is hurt, what thoughts might be
raging in your mind while the police forcefully incapacitate you and
your loved ones, most likely at gunpoint, while carrying out a search
warrant of your home. Assuming you were able to contain the mix of fear
and rage going through your body, consider how helpless you would feel
to know that any perceived noncompliance would most certainly be met
with lethal force.
We have created circumstances under which the American people are no
longer individuals protected by the Bill of Rights, but rather "enemy
combatants." The consequences of such a mindset have proven time and
again to be lethal, as we now rely on military ideology and practice to
respond to crime and justice. For some insight into the implications,
one needn't look any further than minority communities, which have long
been the victims of paramilitary forces posing as police officers. Black
and Latino communities in the inner-cities of Washington DC, Detroit
and Chicago have witnessed first-hand the deadly consequences of
militarization on American soil. Military culture now permeates all
aspects of our society. Does anyone really believe that heavily armed
soldiers trained to kill are capable of maintaining an atmosphere of
nonviolence?
Asset forfeiture, another means of enriching law enforcement at the
expense of the very people the cops are paid to protect, is on the rise.
Civil
asset forfeiture is government seizure of property and cash, even when
the owner isn’t charged with a crime. Innocent owners must go through a
costly, time-consuming process to get their property back — and even
then they may be denied. Police departments get to sell the seized
property and keep most of the proceeds. This author predicts that
because of the shaky US economy and budget crunches, police will
continue to increase searches, raids, and seizures to generate more
revenue. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2010 alone, federal,
state, and local government stole homes, cars, boats, and cash in more
than 15,000 cases. The total take topped $2.5 billion, more than
doubling in the next five years, the last year that these figures were
available as of this writing. Top federal officials are also pushing for
greater use of civil-forfeiture proceedings, in which assets can be
taken without criminal charges being filed against the owner. Unlike in
criminal cases, the poor are not entitled to free legal representation
to help them get their property back. This means, to anyone with common
sense, that an individual’s property could be seized without due process
of law, a CLEAR violation of the Fifth Amendment.....
