Too Many Cops Are Told They’re Soldiers Fighting a War. How Did We Get Here?

These are all generalizations, of course. Certainly there are great cops, great police chiefs and sheriffs, and there are plenty of police agencies that have healthy relationships with the public. But whether it's with the ubiquity of these SWAT raids, stop-and-frisk, or the default geared-up, Robocop response to political protest, the relationship between police and the public on the whole is growing increasingly antagonistic -- and oddly, this comes during a period when both crime and on-duty police deaths are at historic lows.

So my book looks at how we got here. It begins with a look at some of the fundamental concepts of liberty that I believe are threatened by these developments, including the Fourth Amendment, the Castle Doctrine (that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary), and the Third Amendment, which is really a statement of the Founders' broader aversion to militarism and standing armies. But the book's real narrative begins in the mid-1960s, when police departments across the country were struggling to find ways to respond to protest, civic unrest, and outright rioting. It covers the birth of the SWAT team and the war on drugs, then explores the policies, events, and personalities that got us where we are today.

I'll have more on the book in later posts. But in my first post, I also wanted to give some due praise to my hosts, the ACLU, for the organization's campaign to unveil the real extent of police militarization in America. (I wrote about the campaign last March for Huffington Post.)

Back in the late 1990s, the criminologist Peter Kraska sent surveys to police departments across the country, then published several studies documenting the proliferation of SWAT teams. But since then, there's been no real, comprehensive effort to quantify just how militarized America has become. One of my frustrations in covering this issue as a journalist has been the lack of data. Some states have decent enough open records laws to request this sort of information, but many police departments simply don't want to say how often they use their SWAT team, and for what purposes. One ongoing scandal in the criminal justice world, for example, is the fact that there's no reliable data on how often police officers fire their weapons at citizens. The federal government is supposed to collect these figures, but for whatever reason, it simply hasn't done so.





http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform-free-speech-technology-and-liberty/too-many-cops-are-told-theyre-soldiers