[Beyond Pentagon-supplied equipment, the most damaging effect of
war on terror-encouraged police militarization is psychological.
Police officers act like soldiers dealing with enemy combatants,
conforming to the tools provided — with deadly result.]
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THE DYNAMIC IS DELIBERATE: HOW ENDLESS WAR CONTRIBUTES TO POLICE
BRUTALITY  
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Bonnie Kristian
June 2, 2020
Responsible Statecraft
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_ Beyond Pentagon-supplied equipment, the most damaging effect of war
on terror-encouraged police militarization is psychological. Police
officers act like soldiers dealing with enemy combatants, conforming
to the tools provided — with deadly result. _

A police sniper with atop a Special Weapons and Tactical (SWAT)
vehicle at a Ferguson, Missouri protest over the shooting of Michael
Brown, August 13, 2014. “Like tanks in a war zone.”, Jamelle Bouie


 

The indefensible death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis
police officers and the indiscriminate police violence in subsequent
protests have returned police misconduct to the center of our national
conversation.

It is not a conversation we may quickly or easily conclude.
The problems
[[link removed]] in American
[[link removed]] policing are
[[link removed]] multitude
and systemic
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matters of
[[link removed]] both policy
[[link removed]] and culture
[[link removed]].
Much of this can only be
[[link removed]] corrected
at the state or local level, and as there are around 18,000 law
enforcement agencies in the United States, this is a monumental task.
In very few cases
[[link removed]] could
sweeping federal action affect any substantive reform

But one way in which Washington is directly implicated in police
brutality is its contribution
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the militarization of local police departments through the
Pentagon’s 1033 Program and the so-called “war on terror” more
broadly. Often in concert with
[[link removed]] the
war on drugs, the fight against terrorism has been used to blur the
lines
[[link removed]] between
the military and the police, arming ostensible peace officers with
mindsets, tactics, and weapons of war.

Many Americans first learned
[[link removed]] of
the 1033 Program
[[link removed]] in
2014, when both peaceful protest and destructive unrest broke out in
Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal police shooting of Michael
Brown. Photos from Ferguson showed police rolling through suburban
streets in armored vehicles which, to the civilian eye, looked like
tanks in a war zone. They looked like military gear because
they _were_ military gear — Defense Department castoffs given to
local police departments for counter-drug and counter-terror
operations.

The 1033 Program provides much more than vehicles. Police can also
request
[[link removed]] weapons including
[[link removed]] bayonets,
automatic rifles, and grenade launchers, as well as ammunition, body
armor, robots, watercraft, and aircraft including surveillance drones
[[link removed]].
Former President Obama placed a few limits on the equipment transfers
in 2015; Present Trump has since lifted them
[[link removed]].

The outcome was predictable: Police never felt constrained by the
Pentagon’s suggestion for how its hand-me-downs should be used. Cops
use military gear when responding even to nonviolent protests, as
we’ve seen yet again this past week. They use it in many more
mundane situations, too.

Heavily armed SWAT teams, originally created for barricade and hostage
situations, are widely employed beyond that intended
purpose. Documented uses include
[[link removed]] arresting
an unarmed optometrist for privately betting on football games,
ransacking a backyard chicken coop, preventing unlicensed barbering,
and forestalling a suicide attempt by preemptively killing the
suicidal man.

Armored vehicles are used to
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beaches, malls, theme parks, and college ball games. The St. Louis
County Police Department, which includes Ferguson in its purview, uses
a SWAT team to execute _all_ search warrants
[[link removed].].
It is not unique in that practice. Escalation and threat inflation
have become routine in American policing as they are in American
foreign policy.

The 1033 Program, which predates post-9/11 counterterror efforts, is
not the only way the our endless wars has fostered police
militarization in America. Two other aspects deserve special
attention.

First, less visible than armored vehicles is the civil
liberties threat posed by
[[link removed]] the
militarization of police intelligence collection and use. The “war
on terror” served as justification for a massive expansion of
domestic surveillance in America, and that expansion has trickled down
from Washington to police departments around the country. Federal
agencies share the data
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collect via warrantless mass surveillance with state and local law
enforcement. This spying is used to investigate suspected crimes with
no connection to terrorism.

It’s also used to spy on people not suspected of any crime at all:
Washington “loosened
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[[link removed]] law
enforcement guidelines restricting intelligence gathering [by]
removing or weakening the criminal predicates necessary to ensure a
proper focus on illegal activity,” a Brennan Center report explains
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That produced “increased police spying on minorities and political
dissidents and increased efforts to escape judicial and public
oversight.” Meanwhile, federal funds
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police departments ever more invasive spying technology, including
Stingray cell-site simulators whose use is actively concealed
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the public.

Beyond the gear and surveillance, however, perhaps the most damaging
effect of war on terror-encouraged police militarization is
psychological. It pushes police officers engaging with the public to
behave as they look, to act like soldiers dealing with enemy
combatants. The task conforms to the tools provided — with deadly
result.

“Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he’ll
reasonably think that his job isn’t simply to maintain peace, but to
eradicate danger,” observed
[[link removed]] The
Concourse writer Greg Howard amid the Ferguson demonstrations in
2014. “If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods
they patrol are battlefields. And if they’re working battlefields,
it follows that the population is the enemy.”

This dynamic is deliberate: Police officers are explicitly trained
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conceive of themselves as warriors in battle, always on high alert
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to kill
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And it is disproportionately true
[[link removed]] in
black and other minority communities, as the deaths of Floyd and Brown
— and Breonna Taylor
[[link removed]] and Atatiana
Jefferson
[[link removed]] and Philando
Castile
[[link removed]] and Walter
Scott
[[link removed]] and Tamir
Rice
[[link removed]] and Aiyana
Jones [[link removed]] and so
many more — steadily remind us. As long as police continue to
function as an occupying military force
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that list will continue to grow.

[_Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, contributing
editor at The Week, and columnist at Christianity Today._]

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