The Militarization Of The Police

I wrote yesterday about the indefensible actions of a policeman who pepper-sprayed peaceful sitting demonstrators at the University of California - Davis. But that was far from the only police overreaction that has happened against the peaceful Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. Several people were hospitalized in Oakland due to unnecessary and brutal police actions. In Seattle, a pregnant woman was pepper-sprayed and attacked, and that was most likely the cause of her miscarriage a couple of days later. And those are just three of many incidents across the country.

Some on the right have been trying to make excuses for the unnecessary police actions against peaceful people trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Just a couple of nights ago, a couple of talking heads on Fox News tried to minimize the use of pepper spray. Responding to a statement by Bill O'Reilly just causes some burning of the eyes, Megyn Kelly said, "It's like a derivative of actual pepper. It's like a food product, essentially."


That's a ludicrous statement, making it seem as though getting pepper-sprayed by police was no worse than the stinging that occurs when you rub your eyes after cutting some peppers at home. The truth is far different. The hotness of peppers are judged by the Scoville scale. In peppers readily available and used for cooking that scale ranges from 0 for the Bell pepper to about 350,000 for the hot Habanero pepper. Those are food products. The pepper spray used by the police is military grade and would rate between 2,000,000 and 5,300,000 on the Scoville scale -- much worse than any "food product".

But this unnecessary use of pepper spray is only one part of the overreaction by police across the nation to the peaceful Occupy Wall Street protests. The truth is that we have militarized our police in this country and now use that militarized police in ways that we shouldn't. Is it really necessary to have the police dressed in riot helments and protective gear and armed with pepper spray, tasers, automatic weapons, and billy clubs just to control a peaceful demonstration? Isn't this as much a way to provoke violence as to prevent it?

That is the opinion of ex-Seattle police chief Norm Stamper (and I agree with him). Stamper is the police official who turned the riot police loose on the World Trade Organization protesters in that city in 1999. Stamper writes, " My support for a militaristic solution caused all hell to break loose. Rocks, bottles and newspaper racks went flying. Windows were smashed, stores were looted, fires lighted; and more gas filled the streets, with some cops clearly overreacting, escalating and prolonging the conflict."

He goes on to fault the militarizing of our police nationwide, especially since the 9-11 attacks, and says, "Everyday policing is characterized by a SWAT mentality, every other 911 cal a military mission. What emerges is a picture of a vital public-safety institution perpetually at war with its own people."

He is absolutely right. I'm not saying (and neither is he) that there is never a use for a SWAT team -- only that we overuse the concept. And when we turn out fully-garbed riot police to deal with obviously peaceful demonstrators, then we are giving both the demonstrators and the general public the impression that the government considers the protestors to be enemies -- enemies that war must be waged against. Is it any wonder then that the attitude will also permeate the thinking of some of the police officers, and encourage them to act in a violent and improper way?

There is no need to use the SWAT team, or their big brother the riot police, to control a peaceful demonstration. Doing so just heightens the possibility of violence rather than preventing it -- and far too often it is the non-violent who end up getting hurt (and far too often it is the riot police doing that hurting). So far, this extreme tactic has not worked -- it has just re-energized the demonstrators. I hope they don't fall into the trap of reacting to the police violence with violence of their own. That would be a serious mistake.