The Militarization Of Our Police

(This image is from the website stopmakingsense.org.)

The following is from the blog of progressive activist Jim Hightower:

Let's check our weaponry: 93,000 machine guns, 533 planes and helicopters, 180,000 magazine cartridges, and 432 mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles. Okay, let's roll!

Only, this is not the US military. It's your and my local police departments patrolling our cities. Remember "Officer Friendly," the beat cops who were known as "peace officers"? The friendlies have largely been transformed into militarized forces, literally armed with and garbed in war gear and indoctrinated in military psychology, rather than the ethic of community policing.

Twenty years ago, Congress created the military transfer program, providing federal grants so chiefs of police and sheriffs could buy surplus firepower from the Pentagon. In a stunningly short time, our local police forces have become macho-military units, possessing an armory of Pentagon freebies ranging from 30-ton tanks to rifle silencers. They've gone from peacekeeping beats to over-the-top SWAT team aggression, unleashed on the citizenry tens of thousands of times a year, mainly for ordinary police work. For example, a gung-ho Florida SWAT team raided area barbershops in 2010 to stop the horror of "barbering without a license." And masked police in Louisiana launched a military raid on a nightclub in order to perform a liquor law inspection.

Militarization is a dangerous and ultimately deadly perversion of the honorable purpose of policing – and it is literally out of control. The New York Times notes that 38 states have received silencers to use in surreptitious raids. 

A sheriff in a North Dakota rural county with only 11,000 people told a Times reporter that he saw no need for silencers. When it was pointed out that his department had received 40 of them from the Pentagon, he was baffled, saying: "I don't recall approving them."

Mr. Hightower is exactly right. We are in the process of militarizing the police in the United States -- and it is not in just a few large communities. It is happening across the nation in both small and large communities.

As someone who has worked in various aspects of law enforcement most of my adult life, I am not opposed to keeping our police as safe as possible. Sometimes a SWAT team is necessary. But we have gone overboard in militarizing our police departments -- and when you provide this military hardware you can be sure it will be used. Unfortunately, many times it is misused -- used against innocent civilians, or criminals that really don't pose much danger to the police. We are turning our police into small armies, and then turning them loose on our citizenry, when we really should be going more to neighborhood policing.

It is time for American citizens to ask themselves if they want this. We already know that we have more people in prison (both as a whole and per capita) than any other nation, and now we are turning our police into military units (using weapons meant for war). Do you want to live in a police state (with a democratic facade)? Because that is what's happening in the United States.