Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
Radley Balko
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 1610394577
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Today’s armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit—which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers. Nixon’s War on Drugs, Reagan’s War on Poverty, Clinton’s COPS program, the post–9/11 security state under Bush and Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations expanded and empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. And these are just four among a slew of reckless programs.
In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.
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forces all across the country. They seemed particularly likely to pop up in rural areas that didn’t yet have a paramilitary police team (what few were left). The task forces are staffed with local cops drawn from the police agencies in the jurisdictions where the task force operates. Some squads loosely report to a state law enforcement agency, but oversight tends to be minimal to nonexistent. Because their funding comes from the federal government—and whatever asset forfeiture proceeds they
September 2012. 2. William Rhodes, Christina Dyous, Meg Chapman, Michael Shively, Dana Hunt, Kristen Wheeler, “Evaluation of the Multijurisdictional Task Forces (MJTFs), Phase II: MJTF Performance Monitoring Guide, National Institute for Justice, February 2009. 3. For a thorough, well-reported account of the Tulia scandal, see Nate Blakeslee, Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). 4. The Hearne narrative is from the author’s interviews with
interview with the author, August 2012. 22. See “Monks Arrested In SWAT Team Action,” KETV Omaha, February 24, 2006, available at: http://www.ketv.com/Monks-Arrested-In-SWAT-Team-Action/-/9675214/10073774/-/13mbrtfz/-/index.html. 23. Stephen Downing, interview with the author, August 2012. 24. Neill Franklin, interview with the author, August 2012. 25. Norm Stamper, interview with the author, August 2012. 26. Ibid. 27. Neill Franklin, interview with the author, August 2012. 28. Carolyn
I must draw the blinds before we commit a crime. It is whether you and I must discipline ourselves to draw the blinds every time we enter a room, under pain of surveillance if we do not.” Fittingly, Brennan closed with a passage from George Orwell’s 1984: “In the far distance, a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Police Patrol, snooping into people’s windows.”54 The Court’s last real civil
suppose, for the notorious, well-armed, highly trained Medical Marijuana Militia. To the DEA, I am the Godfather of the Medicine Cartel. Finding nothing, they took me back into my home, informed me I was not under arrest, and ordered me—still in handcuffs—to sit down. I was merely being “restrained,” I was told, so the DEA could “enforce the search warrant.”56 The two men were unquestionably growing marijuana—the police found some four thousand plants. The entire operation was legal under
