[In this review from five years ago, a retired Seattle Police
Department official writes about a book that addresses some of the
problems of U.S. policing as an institution. Both the strengths and
weaknesses of this review are revelatory.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

5 WAYS TO LEAVE BEHIND THE “WARRIOR COP” MENTALITY  
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Norm Stamper
February 2, 2015
Yes! Magazine
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_ In this review from five years ago, a retired Seattle Police
Department official writes about a book that addresses some of the
problems of U.S. policing as an institution. Both the strengths and
weaknesses of this review are revelatory. _

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_Rise of the Warrior Cop
The Militarization of America's Police Forces_
Radley Balko
Public Affairs Books
ISBN-13: 9781610392129

You’re in the kitchen. It’s a Saturday morning, still dark
outside. Your partner, three-year-old son, and the family dog are all
sound asleep at the back of the house. You’ve put the coffee pot on,
are making sandwiches—a trip to the lake is planned, your son’s
first fishing trip.

Without warning, the pre-dawn quiet is shattered as your front door
flies off its hinges, followed by back-to-back explosions and blinding
light. Your local police department calling, decked out in cammies,
ballistic helmets, and full-body armor, brandishing M4 and M16 rifles.

“Knife!” shouts a cop. “Drop the knife! Drop the knife!” roar
his nine fellow officers, each pointing a rifle or a pistol at your
chest. The knife in question? A standard, dullbladed utensil you’d
been using to slather mustard and mayo on the sandwiches.

You drop the knife.

“Hands behind your head!” belts out the uniformed chorus.

You slap your hands behind your head. As you’re being shoved to the
floor, your partner rushes from the bedroom, screaming your name,
demanding to know what is happening. Your son follows, wailing
hysterically.

Finally comes Boomer, the family’s gentle seven-year-old Golden
Retriever, bounding down the hall, voicing his own concern about the
invasion. With a Glock semiautomatic, one of the cops silences Boomer:
a .40 caliber shot to the head, another to the chest.

To say the SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) raid was the most
astonishing, traumatic experience of your life is an understatement.
Nor was it comforting to learn, once the gun and grenade smoke had
settled, that the cops had hit the wrong house. (Slumbering across
town, occupants of the “right” house, including a suspected
low-level, nonviolent drug offender, were shortly after awakened by
the same occupying force.)

As Radley Balko points out in his superb book, _Rise of the Warrior
Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, S_WAT incidents
of the type fictionalized above are proliferating at a frightening
pace. In the ’70s, the nation’s roughly 18,000 municipal, county,
and state police forces conducted a few hundred such operations a
year. By the ’80s the number had grown to approximately 3,000. And
in 2005, the last year of collected data, there were more than 50,000
SWAT operations. Today’s count is surely much higher.

Balko’s book offers a depressingly abundant supply of all-too-real
examples of city and county police officers shooting innocent
citizens, getting shot themselves, dispatching beloved family pets,
doing major damage to private dwellings, shredding the Constitution,
souring relations between police and community, and scarring families
for life.

Like the family of Bounkham Phonesavanh. After their home in Wisconsin
burned down, the Phonesavanhs moved in temporarily with relatives
outside Atlanta. On May 28, 2014, Habersham County Sheriff’s
deputies hit the house in a drug raid, battering down the door and
tossing in a stun grenade—which landed in “Baby Bou Bou’s”
crib. The beautiful 19-month-old child’s face and body were severely
burned, his nose blown off in the blast. (Habersham County announced
in November that it will not pay the baby’s medical bills, a sum of
$1 million and counting.)

How is it that so many of today’s police officers have come to
resemble—in appearance, weaponry, and tactics—infantrymen in the
U.S. military? A retired army combat sergeant, recently returned from
Afghanistan, was interviewed on CNN during the protests in Ferguson,
Missouri. He was shown footage of a St. Louis County police officer
sitting high atop an MRAP (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle)
and pointing a sniper rifle at the crowd. The soldier was astonished
and appalled. “This shouldn’t be happening in America,” he said.

The first SWAT team was fielded by Chief Daryl Gates of the Los
Angeles Police Department in 1967 (though some say the term originated
in Philadelphia in 1964). The first high-profile SWAT operation was
against armed and barricaded Black Panthers who had decided to shoot
it out with LAPD officers executing a search warrant. Highly
publicized SWAT operations in 1974 against the Symbionese Liberation
Army and again in 1997 in the “North Hollywood Shootout” (in which
two heavily armed and armored bank robbers held LAPD officers at bay
for 45 minutes) solidified the popular image of SWAT, and spurred
police agencies across the country to adopt the concept.

There is a time and place for military-style tactics, carried out by
police officers who do, in fact, look more like soldiers than cops.
Think active shooter situations, or armed and dangerous suspects
who’ve taken hostages and barricaded themselves. Think service of
warrants accompanied by a reasonable suspicion that the suspects are
armed and poised to do violence. Think terrorists.

But it is the routinization of police militarism that ought to concern
us all. America’s police departments—aided and abetted by the
federal government’s “1033” program, which allocates to local
law enforcement military surplus, including armored vehicles, weapons,
even aircraft—have gradually morphed from images of “Officer
Friendly,” neighborhood-oriented cops to those of war zone
occupiers.

Balko’s book and the ACLU’s first-rate new report, “War Comes
Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” offer
irrefutable evidence of the trend; both publications ought to be
required reading for all Americans who value both freedom and safe
neighborhoods.

But how to reverse the militarization trend? As Seattle’s police
chief during the World Trade Organization’s 1999 “Battle in
Seattle,” and acutely aware of my own unwise reliance on militarized
tactics, I realize just how difficult the task will be. But that
should not stop us. Here are five steps that can help us turn things
around.

1. RESIDENTS OF CITIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY MUST RISE UP AND RECLAIM
THEIR POLICE DEPARTMENTS.

The police in America belong to the people, not the other way around.
An organized, mobilized citizenry is essential to the kind of
structural and cultural reforms necessary for reasoned, responsible,
and responsive policing.

2. SUSTAINED SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PRESSURE FOR DEMILITARIZATION IS
ESSENTIAL.

Mayors, city council members, sheriffs, and police chiefs should be
elected or selected, in significant measure, on the basis of their
dedication to authentic “community policing.” At the heart of
community policing is a demonstrable commitment to a problem-solving
partnership between the police department and the people it serves.
Citizen-police partners must work together to identify, analyze, and
solve crime, traffic, and other neighborhood problems—including the
nature and quality of the relationship itself. Indeed, police officers
and their “civilian” partners must act in unified fashion on
agency policies and procedures, program development, and crisis
management. No more unilateral decisions about what’s “best for
the community.”

3. LOCAL POLITICAL JURISDICTIONS MUST IMPLEMENT INDEPENDENT CITIZEN
OVERSIGHT OF POLICE PRACTICES.

Currently, no single model works flawlessly, and many flounder. But
successful approaches in the future will incorporate investigative
authority, including subpoena powers, for oversight bodies.
Professionalism, competence, and cooperation between police management
and labor are essential. It won’t happen by Tuesday of next week.
But the hard, thorny work must begin, urgently.

4. IT IS VITAL THAT ALL LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES, IN CONJUNCTION WITH
THEIR COMMUNITIES, SET AND ENFORCE RIGOROUS STANDARDS FOR THE
SELECTION, TRAINING, AND SYSTEMATIC RETRAINING OF SWAT OFFICERS AND
THEIR LEADERS.

Also crucial: a similarly demanding definition of what justifies a
SWAT mission. Emphatically not part of that definition is the use of
chemical agents on nonviolent, nonthreatening protesters or the
conspicuous presence of military weaponry (including sniper rifles, as
seen in Ferguson) at political protests.

5. END THE DRUG WAR.

Eighty percent of all SWAT raids are in service of search or arrest
warrants, the vast majority of them aimed at low-level, nonviolent
drug offenders. Indeed, it was in the early prosecution of the drug
war that we sowed the seeds of police militarization. Certainly, in
the aftermath of 9/11 we witnessed a dramatic expansion of police
militarization (as well as a deeply troubling attack on our civil
liberties). But it has been the “War on Drugs,” with its reliance
on the thoroughly bankrupt policy of prohibition, that has done such
terrible damage to individuals, families, and neighborhoods, and to
the community-police relationship. Ending the drug war, replacing
prohibition with a regulatory model, will do much to demilitarize our
local PDs. The federal government can and must play a significant role
in setting and enforcing national guidelines to end excessive police
militarization. But it is the people of America—organized,
mobilized, and motivated—who can bring an end to those horrifying
pre-dawn raids and to the specter of a military-like occupation of
U.S. neighborhoods.

 

Norm Stamper [[link removed]] is a
34-year veteran police officer who retired as Seattle’'s chief of
police in 2000. He is a trainer, consultant, expert witness, keynote
speaker, and the author of two books, most recently _To Protect and
Serve: How to Fix America’s Police._

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