To receive Global Researchs Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here. While proponents say militarized police units enhance officer safety and prevent violence, critics argue these tactics are targeted at racial minorities, and diminish trust between citizens and law enforcement. A subtler cost is heightened police suspicion of, and distance from, the communities they serve, thus increasing officers perception that individuals are threatening and that force is necessary to subdue them. The second section examines the material dimension of militarization, which involves expanded use of police paramilitary units and military equipment. Find new ideas and inspiration using our free samples. Policing scholar Peter Kraska defines police militarization as the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.5 He describes militarism as a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions that stress the use of force and threat of violence as the most appropriate and efficacious means to solve problems.6 Kraska suggests that there are four dimensions of militarization: (1) material, reflected in greater use of military equipment; (2) cultural, involving the adoption of military beliefs and values; (3) organizational, as evidenced, for example, by the use of paramilitary units modeled on military special operations forces; and (4) operational, reflected in aggressive preventive patrolling.7 He acknowledges that there has always been some military influence on policing, since, like the military, police are authorized to use force if necessary to achieve their objectives.8 Since militarization is, therefore, a matter of degree, the relevant question is where the civilian police fall on the continuum and in what direction they are headed.9. This history has generated the belief among many African Americans that the police are people from whom they need to protect themselves rather than people they can look to for protection. 28 The Posse Comitatus Act is a reflection of the often close relationship between race and regulation of the use of force in much of American history. President Ronald Reagan elevated the prominence of this campaign and devoted substantial resources to waging it. teams breaking down doors and shooting people for minor drug offenses. The key to our success is that were an elite crime fighting team thats not bogged down in the regular bureaucracy. As the Justice Department described it, the program was based on a two-pronged approach to crime control and prevention: Law enforcement agencies and prosecutors cooperate in weeding out criminals from the designated area. But it has very little impact in terms of crime overall, Lemieux said. Rosa Brooks research on American policing leads her to conclude that [t]he majority of law-enforcement academies in the United States are loosely modeled on military boot camps.60 Over the past two decades, the speaker who has probably helped train more police departments than anyone else is Dave Grossman, a former West Point professor whose books deal with the psychological experience of killing and its aftermath.61 One article in 2017 estimated that he had spoken to more than 100 police departments across the country in the previous two years.62, Grossman refers to his area of expertise as killology, and his work provides insights into the complex psychological and emotional consequences of taking life. Conservatives Define What Woke Means To Them, Biden Announces Nation Can Stay Up Till 9:30 Tonight, Same tactics used successfully in Afghanistan, Iraq, Modern law enforcement simply cannot do their job properly by relying on handguns, tasers, and tear gas alone, A real shot in arm for nations ailing weapons industry, Look on drivers face when tank pulls up beside Mini Cooper always fun, Local photojournalists now able to capture fog of war at home, Nice surprise treat for veterans to see weapons they used in war pop up on their hometown streets, Never a bad idea to put a more powerful gun in someones hand, Actually going to seem pretty quaint when compared with police armaments 20 years from now, Most police officers have proven fully capable of violently subduing protesters without any military-grade weapons, It actually very hard to recite Miranda rights while holding 40-pound grenade launcher, There no longer any middle ground between community watch and military, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles only get 5 miles per gallon, Military-style helmets limit peripheral vision while firing indiscriminately into crowd, Could potentially be abused if put in lesser hands than Americas historically honest and virtuous police departments, Takes away that personal touch of beating a suspect to death with bare hands. Today, the civilian militia takes the form of state National Guard units, which can be federalized when the president deems appropriate. 82 Harry Levine, Unjust and Unconstitutional: 60,000 Jim Crow Marijuana Arrests in Mayor deBlasios New York, Drug Policy Alliance & Marijuana Arrest Research Project, July 2017, 7, https://drugpolicy.org/sites/default/files/Marijuana-Arrests-NYC--Unjust-Unconstitutional--July2017_2.pdf. 146 Kraska and Kappeler, Militarizing American Police, 4. From reading I went to writing. They have the right, either by law, or by general consent, to inflict discretionary chastisement upon a black man caught beyond the boundaries of his masters estate without a pass, and even to shoot him, if he attempts to escape.269. These included criminal acts of resistance such as theft, crop destruction, arson, and poisoning. The work in this field includes research on both the material and cultural dimensions of militarization. My goal in this article is to examine whether this is occurring, whether it is contributing to more effective law enforcement, and what its broader impacts might be. Others they use are the envelopment of a single flank, envelopment of both flanks, attacks in oblique order, feigned withdrawal, attack from a defensive position, indirect approach and perhaps one of the most talked about, offensive revolutionary/guerilla warfare. He found that militarized images of police were associated with a 3.2-point decline in the desire for more police patrols in ones neighborhood.238, Another 2017 study examined the total value of military equipment transferred to counties in Connecticut, Maine, Nevada, and New Hampshire from 2006 to 2014.239 Controlling for relevant variables, the authors found that receiving no military equipment corresponded with 0.287 expected civilian deaths by police in a county for a given year, while receiving the maximum amount of such equipment corresponds with 0.656 deaths. We have converted all our patrol vehicle shotguns to a type of breaching shotgun. All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the authors name. While there have been high-profile incidents resulting in deaths, the very limited data that are available suggest that this occurs infrequently. Need more information or looking for a custom solution? They are also more likely to have SWAT deployed in their neighborhoods. 182 Phillips, Wheeler, and Kim, The Effect of Police Paramilitary Unit Raids, 206. To do this, he analyzed the relationship between the percentage of black residents in a particular geographic area with the volume of SWAT deployments per 100,000 residents. 12 Robert M. Gates, The Overmilitarization of American Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs 99, no. These include undercover sting operations, pretextual stops for minor legal violations, various surveillance techniques, and surprise raids designed to obtain evidence for arrests.36 As Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler have described, Rather than reactively responding to traditional crimes such as robbery, the police can go into the population and proactively produce cases against an almost limitless number of drug users and low-level dealers.37. By contrast, the military protects the community from outsiders. When enemies are embedded in the community and do not wear uniforms, this attitude of suspicion can extend to a large portion of people in the community. 88 Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel, Pulled Over, 72. In fact, police are more likely to use force on protesters for racial justice than those aiming to uphold white supremacy. This type of operation, and the assumptions that underlie it, is characteristic of the use of military force against enemies not law enforcement activities to protect fellow citizens. The next section describes how a variety of policing practices that do not involve the use of lethal force can nonetheless reflect a military orientation. 280 Bass, Policing Space, Policing Race, 163. The message is that police are agents of the state authorized to use intense violence against anyone who poses a threat, and that everyone in the home is a suspect and ongoing force can be used if they do not fully comply with orders. WebThe militarization of the police has been a public concern and controversial topic over the recent years. The Pros And Cons Of Militarizing The Police. Counterevidence from the Federal 1033 Program and Local Police Jurisdictions in the United States, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA, 2018, and the Benefits and Costs of Policing Symposium, New York University School of Law, 2018, https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Militarization.pdf. Maseras study also found that each dollar per capita increase in military equipment was associated with an increase of killings by police of 0.08 per 100,000 persons, leading him to conclude that the militarization of the police can explain all the recent increases in police killings in the area he studied.233, Several additional studies show mixed results or cast doubt on the effectiveness of material militarization. 165 Kevin Sack, Door-Busting Drug Raids Leave a Trail of Blood, New York Times, March 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/18/us/forced-entry-warrant-drug-raid.html. Send an email to Genevieve. 185 Kim, Phillips, and Wheeler, Using Symbolic Swat Raids, 198. 276 See, for example, Randall G. Shelden and Pavel V. Vasiliev, Controlling the Dangerous Classes: A History of Criminal Justice in America, 3rd ed. 121 The Police Response to Active Shooter Incidents, Police Executive Research Forum, Critical Issues in Policing Series, March 2014, 1. 66 Justin Peters, I Learned to Think Like a Warrior Cop, Slate, Aug. 28, 2020, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-class-dave-grossman-killology.html. Greater interaction between police and individuals due to aggressive preventive policing therefore may increase the likelihood of violent confrontations. 1 (April 1977): 81101, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800003388. Sierra-Arvalo observes that the danger imperative framework provides a powerful filter through which police interpret information, leading them to view their work as dangerous despite data to the contrary: That policing is growing statistically safer over time is of little consequence to officers on patrol, particularly if they or their fellow officers have been direct or vicarious victims of violence. @genevievewood Research has identified various ways to attempt to prevent crime by combining professional expertise with community involvement. WebOne cannot discuss police militarization without discussing the socioeconomic issues surrounding it and disproportionate effects it has on certain groups of people. The thousands of local police departments across the country necessarily vary with respect to the dimensions of militarization I have described. SWAT team no-knock raids and police deployed with military equipment are Appreciating this dimension of militarization underscores that police should not act like soldiers because police are meant to protect citizens against criminals, while soldiers protect citizens against enemies. Kraska and Louis Cubellis surveyed departments with fewer than 100 officers in towns of the same size and found that 25.6 percent had SWAT units in 1980, which increased to 52.1 percent in 1990. Police are justified in stopping and questioning them only on the basis of individual evidence of suspected wrongdoing. The use of such tactics has been criticized for contributing to the militarization of law enforcement and the erosion of civil liberties. replicated the Bove and Gavrilova analysis on the county level after adjusting for several inconsistencies between data previously released by the Defense Department and currently available data. The sentiment behind such laws was expressed well by the editor of the Lynchburg Virginian in 1865: [S]tringent police regulations may be necessary to keep [freedmen] from overburdening the towns and depleting the agricultural regions of labor. Some may claim that police stop racial and ethnic minorities more often because the percentage of crimes they commit is higher, in some cases substantially so, than the percentage of the population that is made up by members of these groups.95 The problem with this claim is that the vast majority of racial and ethnic minorities commit no crimes. A deeper concern, however, is that they impose barriers between the police and the communities they serve that reflects the cultural dimension of militarization. Another aspect of cultural militarization is the belief that regular police officers need military-grade weapons to do their job. 192 See, Law Enforcement Support Office, Defense Logistics Agency, Defense Logistics Agency, accessed July 3, 2020, https://www.dla.mil/DispositionServices/Offers/Reutilization/LawEnforcement.aspx. They have automatic weapons now.114 The Miami police chief reported that the department was in the process of providing an assault rifle to every officer based on concerns that AK-47s and assault weapons from former Soviet bloc countries were flooding into southern Florida.115, The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence argues that the 2004 expiration of the federal ban on assault weapons has intensified the arms race, and that [p]olice officers need to be able to defend themselves and the rest of us, and they need the weapons to do so.116 This is a national problem, said the Miami police chief. 215 Sam Bieler, Police Militarization in the USA: The State of the Field, Policing 39, no. In recent decades, police units have grown more militarized in part due to the War on Drugs campaign as well as federal initiatives that supplied neighborhoods with excess military equipment and funds to purchase arms. The Pros And Cons Of Militarizing The Police. 96 Kevin Mullaney and Mitt Regan, One Minute in Haditha: Ethics and Non-Conscious Decision Making, Journal of Military Ethics 18, no. Recently, I heard from a former student of mine, Ashley. 193 Kenneth Lowande, Police Demilitarization and Violent Crime, Nature Human Behavior (2020). Theres truth in numbers in policing until there isnt, Bad apples come from rotten trees in policing, To add value to Black communities, we must defund the police and prison systems, The geography of crime in four U.S. cities: Perceptions and reality, The UKs landmark effort to stop dirty money flowing into its real estate sector may be working. I Learned to Think Like a Warrior Cop, Slate, Aug. 28 2020. But it has very little impact in terms of crime overall, Lemieux.. Expertise with community involvement the basis of individual evidence of suspected wrongdoing field includes Research on the... 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