Former U.S. Soldiers and Increasingly Militarized Police Forces

The military defends the nation from abroad; cops defend it from within. Ninety-nine percent of the work a cop will do is traffic stops, investigations, and show of force. They do train to use their weapon if needed, but firefights are not the bread and butter of their job. Infantry in the military, on the other hand, trains for combat, mainly large scale combat. The military doesn't teach you how to restrain people or prevent injuries to your combatants. A board established by Gov. John Kasich is considering ways to make needless use of violence by law enforcement officers less common. Suggestions, some already adopted by the General Assembly, have included better education requirements and improved training. Another idea, one the board is studying, is standards for when police officers and sheriffs' deputies can use force. All of this will help. But the bottom line - individual officers' psychological traits - has not received adequate attention. Is a certain officer easily rattled in stressful situations? Does another enjoy harassing people? Is yet another given to using his weapons even if they are not necessary? And how can law enforcement officials tell these things about their officers and deputies? There is a difference between the military and police, of course, and it is an excellent reason for Kasich's panel to talk to the Pentagon: On the streets, deadly force should always be a last resort. In fact, one prized character trait in the military - aggressiveness - is a drawback in law enforcement. You may not want a soldier who is courteous, patient and understanding, but those aren't bad things to have in a cop. [Source]

Cops or soldiers? [Excerpt]

March 22, 2014

The Economist - Civil libertarians such as Radley Balko, the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop”, fret that the American police are becoming too much like soldiers. Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams (ie, paramilitary police units) were first formed to deal with violent civil unrest and life-threatening situations: shoot-outs, rescuing hostages, serving high-risk warrants and entering barricaded buildings, for instance. Their mission has crept.

Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a license”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organizing cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog. According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants in private homes.

He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s (there are around 18,000 state and local police agencies in America, compared with fewer than 100 in Britain).

The number of SWAT deployments soared even as violent crime fell. And although in recent years crime rates have risen in smaller American cities, Mr Kraska writes that the rise in small-town SWAT teams was driven not by need, but by fear of being left behind. Fred Leland, a police lieutenant in the small town of Walpole, Massachusetts, says that police departments in towns like his often invest in military-style kit because they “want to keep up” with larger forces.

The courts have smiled on SWAT raids. They often rely on “no-knock” warrants, which authorize police to force their way into a home without announcing themselves. This was once considered constitutionally dubious. But the Supreme Court has ruled that police may enter a house without knocking if they have “a reasonable suspicion” that announcing their presence would be dangerous or allow the suspect to destroy evidence (for example, by flushing drugs down the toilet).

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With Aid of the Pentagon, Police Develop Military Mind Set [Excerpt]

September 12, 1999

Diane Cecilia Weber - Since 1981, when Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Official Act, the military has become increasingly involved in civilian law enforcement, and has been encouraged to share equipment, training, facilities and technology with civilian enforcement agencies.


During the past 20 years, under the direct political sponsorship of elected representatives in Congress and under successive presidents, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 -- a law designed to keep the military out of civilian affairs -- has been diluted by exceptions tied to the war on drugs. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan officially designated drug trafficking as a "national security" threat. A year later, Congress set up an administrative apparatus, with a toll-free number, to encourage local civilian agencies to take advantage of military assistance.

In 1989, President George Bush created six regional joint task forces in the Department of Defense to act as liaisons between police and the military. (The BATF and FBI relied on Joint Task Force 6 for help in the Waco assaults).

Wartime arms in peacetime

A few years later, Congress ordered the Pentagon to make military surplus hardware available
to state and local police for enforcement of drug laws -- which the military has done, free of charge. And in 1994, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice signed an agreement enabling the military to transfer wartime technology to local police departments for peacetime use in American neighborhoods, against American citizens.

This sharing of military resources with civilian agencies has not only gone to federal agencies but also to police bureaus across the nation, from the huge Los Angeles Police Department to the seven-member department in Jasper, Fla. (population 2,000). The result has been an alarming militarization of local law enforcement. Most hardware has been funneled to special paramilitary units in departments known as Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, contributing to what criminal justice scholar Peter Kraska has called the "militarization of Mayberry."

Since the early 1980s, SWAT teams have proliferated. A 1997 study by Kraska showed that 90 percent of cities with populations of more than 50,000 had paramilitary units, as did three-quarters of those with populations under 50,000. The Pentagon has been equipping those units with everything from M-16 automatic rifles to grenade launchers. Jasper's seven-member force, for example, has been the beneficiary of seven M-16s, 23 helicopters, an armored personnel carrier, two C-12 aircraft and a bomb robot. Los Angeles asked for, and got, 600 M-16s after a February 1997 shootout with bank robbers carrying automatic weapons and wearing body armor.

Between 1995 and 1997, the military handed over 1.2 million pieces of surplus military hardware to police SWAT teams. But more important, about half of SWAT members get their training from active-duty military personnel, some of them from the Navy SEALS or Army Rangers. Like those special operations units, the SWAT team is structured as a combat unit, with a commander, a tactical leader, a scout, a sniper and so on.

This, in combination with full battle dress of lace-up combat boots, full-body armor in black or camouflage, Kevlar helmets and -- for a touch of impersonality -- "Ninja" hoods, has produced a military mind set in many police departments.

In the military mind set, the "drug war" has moved from metaphor to real life, with American streets as the "front," American citizens as the "enemy" and law enforcement officers as the warriors.

This mind set has been fed by the Department of Justice. "So let me welcome you to the kind of war our police fight every day," Attorney General Janet F. Reno told a group of defense and intelligence experts in 1994, in preparation for a technology transfer agreement. "And let me challenge you to turn your skills that served us so well in the Cold War to helping us with the war we're now fighting daily in the streets of our towns and cities across the nation."

SWAT units, originally created in the 1960s to deal with special situations such as snipings, hijackings and hostage takings, have become an everyday part of American policing.

As crime rates have plummeted, these paramilitary units have expanded their original mission and are deployed for routine police functions such as "warrant work" -- i.e., no-knock entries to serve arrest or search warrants. Other teams, such as the 34-member SWAT unit in Fresno, Calif., are used -- in full battle dress, armed with machine guns -- to patrol the inner-city "war zone."

What's wrong with this picture? Plenty. A soldier and a law enforcement officer serve completely different functions, and fusing their identities presents a serious, long-term danger to a free society. A soldier does not think; he initiates violence on command and doesn't worry about Miranda rights. Being a killing machine is necessary to the survival of the warrior, and to the survival of the nation at war.

A law enforcement officer, however, is a citizen like the rest of us, subject to the same laws. The job of the police is to react to the violence of others, to apprehend criminal suspects and deliver them over to a court of law. This defines a nation under the rule of law -- as opposed to a nation under martial law -- and the distinction goes as far back as 13th-century common law.

When police act like soldiers, bad things happen, not only to the nation's social health but to innocent individuals. Until a few years ago, for example, killings by Albuquerque's SWAT unit were "just off the charts," said an outside investigator, Sam Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska.
The team's final killing -- before it was disbanded and a new police chief was installed -- was of 33-year-old Larry Harper, a sad, desperate man with no criminal record, intent on committing suicide.

When the frightened family called local police, SWAT snipers showed up, followed Harper to the edge of a park and, from 43 feet away, shot and killed the cowering man. According to Walker, the Albuquerque SWAT team "had an organizational culture that led them to escalate situations upward rather than de-escalating."

Excessive force

The 10-member La Plata County, Colo., SWAT team stormed Samuel Heflin's 46-acre ranch in Bayfield in April 1996, searching for evidence related to a barroom brawl: a cowboy hat, a shirt and a cigarette pack. In the process, an 8-year-old boy playing basketball was forced down at gunpoint, as was a 14-year-old boy.

Sheriff's deputies then followed screaming Shelby Heflin, 4, into the house with a laser-sighted weapon pointed at her back. The SWAT team ordered everyone to lie face down, and when Heflin asked to see a search warrant, he was told to "shut the f--- up." The family has filed an excessive force suit against the county's SWAT team.

In 1997, the SWAT team of Dinuba, Calif. (population 15,000), broke into the home of Ramon Gallardo, looking for his son, and shot the unarmed Gallardo 15 times. A jury awarded the family $12.5 million, which exceeded the town's insurance coverage. The town has disbanded its SWAT unit.

There have been other victims of wrongful deaths, including the Rev. Accelyne Williams, who died from a heart attack when Boston's SWAT unit raided the wrong apartment, and 64-year-old Mario Paz, shot twice in the back when the El Monte, Calif., SWAT team blew the locks off his doors with a shotgun, looking for someone who had used that address.

Doubtless the will be more such cases, and citizens will grow warier of the law enforcement establishment. The military mentality, along with machine guns and grenade launchers, have no place in a free society.
When police think and act like soldiers, they generate mistrust among their constituents, which in turn pushes law enforcement agencies further into an elitist, impersonal enclave.

Luckily, our democratic process has remedies. Congress can, and should, eliminate exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act and redefine the military's mission to defend the nation against foreign aggressors. Joint Task Forces in the Department of Defense should be abolished, and police agencies -- federal, state and local -- should be forced to return military hardware, especially automatic weapons, or destroy it.

Americans have to ask themselves whether the "drug war" is really worth altering our society beyond recognition. Defining our nation's drug woes as a public health problem, and not as a crime problem, might be a start.

Related:

• How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police 
• Avoiding the Us vs. Them Mentality 
• There is a mistake in classifying people as sheep, wolves, or sheepdogs. People are situational
• Multimillionaire and 'The Most Lethal Sniper in American Military History,' Chris Kyle, Planned To Become A Police Officer for Dalworthington Gardens 
• How Do You Bypass the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act? You Militarize the Police
• Texas House debates 'Chris Kyle Bill' to fast-track police jobs for ex-military
He had so many titles, but he wanted one more: Chris Kyle wanted to be a cop. It was important to him, he wanted it, he was excited about the process of getting a badge, said his widow, Taya. Chris Kyle's police officer dreams couldn't come true, but perhaps other people's dreams can, and fast. Taya Kyle went to Austin to hear the first public testimony about a proposal to change Texas law. It would allow military veterans who prove their skills to skip out on certain parts of the police academy, streamlining access to employment. We have this pool of skilled people that we need to take advantage of, said Rep. Dan Flynn of Van Zandt County, the sponsor of the bill. He calls his bill a jobs bill. It will likely be renamed for Chris Kyle. Chris was on his way to becoming a police officer with the Dalworthington Gardens Police Department. Chris was going to go to the full-time academy, said Chief Bill Waybourn, a friend of Kyle's.