Testimony before the House Subcommittee on CrimeMr. Chairman, distinguished members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to speak today.
I’m here to talk about police militarization, a troubling trend that’s been on the rise in America’s police departments over the last 25 years.
Militarization is a broad term that refers to using military-style weapons, tactics, training, uniforms, and even heavy equipment by civilian police departments.
It’s a troubling trend because the military has a very different and distinct role than our domestic peace officers.
The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. The police are supposed to protect us while upholding our constitutional rights. It’s dangerous to conflate the two.But that’s exactly what we’re doing. Since the late
1980s, Mr. Chairman, thanks to acts passed by the U.S. Congress, millions of pieces of surplus military equipment have been given to local police departments across the country.We’re not talking just about computers and office equipment. Military-grade semi-automatic weapons, armored personnel vehicles, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and all manner of other equipment designed for use on the battlefield is now being used on American streets, against American citizens.
Academic criminologists credit these transfers with the dramatic rise in paramilitary SWAT teams over the last quarter century.
SWAT teams were originally designed to be used in violent, emergency situations like hostage takings, acts of terrorism, or bank robberies. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, that’s primarily how they were used, and they performed marvelously.
But beginning in the early 1980s, they’ve been increasingly used for routine warrant service in drug cases and other nonviolent crimes. And thanks to the Pentagon transfer programs, there are now a lot more of them.
This is troubling because paramilitary police actions are extremely volatile, necessarily violent, overly confrontational, and leave very little margin for error. These are acceptable risks when you’re dealing with an already violent situation featuring a suspect who is an eminent threat to the community.But when you’re dealing with nonviolent drug offenders, paramilitary police actions create violence instead of defusing it. Whether you’re an innocent family startled by a police invasion that inadvertently targeted the wrong home or a drug dealer who mistakes raiding police officers for a rival drug dealer, forced entry into someone’s home creates confrontation. It rouses the basest, most fundamental instincts we have in us – those of self-preservation – to fight when flight isn’t an option.
Peter Kraska, a criminologist at the University of Eastern Kentucky, estimates we’ve seen a startling 1,500 percent increase in the use of SWAT teams in this country from the early 80s until the early 2000s. And the vast majority of these SWAT raids are for routine warrant service.
These violent raids on American homes, when coupled with the imperfect, often ugly methods used in drug policing, have set the stage for disturbingly frequent cases of police raiding the homes not only of recreational, nonviolent drug users, but the homes of people completely innocent of any crime at all.
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http://reason.com/archives/2007/07/02/our-militarized-police-departm