The Militarization Of Local Police Has Been Decades In The Making
Even before states began to deploytheNational Guard and President Donald Trump unleashed federal police forces in Washington, the streets of many U.S. cities already looked as if they were swarming with soldiers.
At a daytime protest of deadly police violence in Cincinnati, officers with the sheriff’s department formed a compact row of shields and riot helmets while police parked massive, mine-resistant vehicles nearby. Officers in Miami wore head-to-toe body armor while those with the King County Sheriff’s Department in Seattle wore helmets and tactical uniforms. And many officers were violent: Police in multiple cities were filmed showering protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, apparently unprovoked, while others were recordedassaulting or macing unarmed protesters.
Their violence has been years in the making. For decades, federal funding for the war on drugs has encouraged ordinary local law enforcement agencies to amass huge military arsenals. This trend is never more obvious to the general public than during huge protest movements, when the equipment is set upon unarmed demonstrators. And as people grow more outraged by what they see, calls arise to demilitarize the police. A bipartisan push in Congress this week aims to end a Pentagon program that transfers military hardware to local authorities.
But removing the equipment is just treating one of the symptoms of a system that goes deeper.
“At this point, ‘military’ is already the culture of policing,” said Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has studied police militarization for decades.
Attributing police violence to the officers’ militarized hardware — claiming that everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer — gets it backward, Kraska said. Police obtain military gear because their culture, training, and methods inculcate the idea that they’re warriors. They’re trained to see nails, and so they grab hammers.
Kraska pointed to a viral...
