Posting #7: The story about American police (and their militarization)

The story and its contradictions

The dominant story in the United States is that we are a country of laws, that law is nondiscriminatory and moral, that no one is above the law, and that law enforcement is not only necessary but also objective, fair, and just.  Think of the blindfolded Justice statue, representing an impartial and objective law.  As the arm of law enforcement that implements the law, police forces across the country also are assumed to be objective, fair, and just.  This part of the story says that police are the honorable upholders of peace they profess with their slogan, “serve and protect.” They are the “good guys with a gun,” the small-town sheriff Andy Griffith and big-city investigator Joe Friday amongst us. “Blue Lives Matter,” the dominant story concludes.

But American police forces have been influenced by historical dynamics that defy that story by linking the alleged “peacekeepers” to violent and often unfettered militarism.  Not only are they now most likely to be as heavily armed as our US military forces, they also are trained to commit the same violence: to kill.  How do we square the dominant story of police forces kindly protecting all of us with the reality of having armed and ready killers in our midst?

The backstory

US police forces are said to have originated in seventeenth and eighteenth century privately-employed slave patrols.  They also are said to have originated more formally in the nineteenth century in cities like Boston, New York, and New Orleans with the burgeoning numbers of immigrants and the problems allegedly inherent to them.  Noted American historian Jill Lepore claims that “Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration.”  The overt law enforcement connection to militarism began as long ago as 1909 in Berkeley, California, with the claim by the former-military police chief that “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.”  

Lepore points out how various iterations of that connection to militarism have only persisted in the United States.  Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws enabled the ham-fisted use of violence by police forces against African Americans and Latinos, “state police” were enacted as private paramilitary forces of industrialists to break up unions, and in the 1950s, the Border Patrol was introduced as a “national quasi-military focused on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants.”  Heavily-armed SWAT teams emerged during the late-1960s as an answer to what were considered the most perilous domestic situations: riots, drug cartels, militia, and high-stakes kidnappings.

Law Enforcement Agencies and weapons of war

Since the 1990s, however, courtesy of the Department of Defense (DoD), police forces nationwide have become even more militarized with easy access to weapons of war.  In 1990, the federal “1208 program” temporarily required DoD to give surplus military equipment to state and local police forces who were countering drug activities.  In 1994, state and local governments were permitted via the 1122 program to “purchase law enforcement equipment [less expensively because of bulk orders] through Federal procurement channels, provided that the equipment is used in the performance of counter-drug activities,” homeland security, and emergency services.  In 1997, what had been the temporary 1208 program became the permanent and what we know now as the “1033 Program,” or the DLA LESO (Defense Logistics Agency Law Enforcement Support Office).  All three of these programs were started as part of the “war on drugs” and were a convenient way for DoD to offload millions of dollars’ worth of used and surplus military equipment like riot gear, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, helicopters, firearms, body armor, and pepper spray.  SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams especially have benefited from this arms largesse, so that these teams are used, rather than for the most perilous, “special” situations for which they were designed, instead for the most routine deployments across the nation.  For instance, whereas in the early-1980s there were a few thousand “no-knock” raids, now there are tens of thousands. One might wonder, then, whether there is a causal relationship between the way a Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) is armed and how it behaves.

There certainly has been an escalation in the number of weapons doled out to LEAs, including police forces.  A scholar at the “Costs of War” project at Brown University, Jessica Katzenstein, reports that in the first decade of the 1033 Program, there were 17,000 transfers of individual items worth $27M to federal, state, and local LEAs.  After 9/11/2001, however, with the acceleration of domestic counterterrorism measures, there were 520,000 transfers of individual items worth $1.6B.  These transfers were compounded by equipment no longer needed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, so that US LEAs are now awash with weapons of war.  Since the program’s inception about thirty years ago, by one estimate the Department of Defense has transferred $7.4 billion of equipment to more than 8000 American law enforcement agencies, and by another estimate, $15B.  One might conclude that these transfers have effectively normalized the appearance of military armaments on American streets. 

But getting American people accustomed to seeing weapons of war on our streets and in our homes had begun decades before, as the National Rifle Association and its lobbying allies methodically and strategically elevated gun culture to a preeminent position in the United States.  A July 30, 2023, New York Times article, “The Secret History of Gun Rights: How Lawmakers Armed the NRA,” asserts that “Over decades, politics, money and ideology altered gun culture, reframed the Second Amendment to embrace ever broader gun rights and opened the door to relentless marketing driven by fear rather than sport.”  Many of the article’s named lawmakers—Democratic and Republican—from at least 1975 also served on the NRA’s board, so that they were simultaneously the lobbyists and the lobbied.  Our reality now is stark, as the lawmakers/board members worked assiduously to normalize the weapons-escalation represented by Second Amendment activism.  Moreover, many of those firearms increasingly are assault weapons, or weapons of war, with the importation of 2.8M in 2020 alone. Furthermore, as of April 2023, 25 states did not require permits to carry weapons openly, so that we can see these assault weapons brazenly being carried in public. Certainly, this escalation represents a problem for LEAs, since now what is “normal” are US residents—not the too-often-used militarizing word, “civilians”—owning nearly twice as many firearms as there are adults, and mass shootings are routine.

What is perceived by Americans as “normal” in regard to heavily-armed LEAs, though, varies by race and age.  A 2018 RAND study of the 1033 Program indicates that there are wide differences of opinion between people of different racial identities and ages on whether LEAs should have military armaments.  The study finds that older white people are more accepting of local police forces being equipped with military weaponry, suggesting that the militarizing has been normalized for them and that perception, above all, matters most. “Much of the criticism of the program from the media and sources outside of the federal government are centered around the appearance of the equipment that LEAs have in their possession or have employed” (xix; emphasis added).  Thus, the psychological impact on the American populace of U.S. police forces appearing to be militarized matters as much as the weaponry they actually deploy.

Law Enforcement Agencies and psychological militarization

Likewise, law enforcement agencies also are psychologically militarized.  Just as having assault weapons easily available to ordinary residents and visible on our streets desensitizes the populace to their menace, so, too, do LEAs become desensitized to their having arsenals of military weapons.  In no uncertain terms, they are trained to think of themselves as combatants and their community members as adversaries.  This “warrior mindset” or “killology” was developed initially by Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger officer, professor at West Point, and now a trainer of LEAs across the country.  His website reports that his books On Killing and On Combat have been required reading at the US Marine Corps, the FBI academy, and numerous other academies and colleges. 

In an August 2021 Washington Post interview following some high-profile killings of American residents by police officers, Grossman says:

I tell cops our mission is never to kill. We are always trying to save lives, and we are using deadly force because we sincerely believe there is no other option in the face of imminent threat of life, limb or grievous bodily harm of self or others.  If he’s not emotionally and psychologically prepared to use that gun at the moment of truth, he’ll panic and bad things will happen. 

But as Slate journalist Justin Peters took the Grossman online course, “On Combat,” he recognizes how Grossman stops short of the fuller truth in the interview cited above.  In the course, Peters reports, Grossman says

As a cop, or a peacekeeper, your job is not to kill. It is to serve and protect. To do that, you may have to kill.  The most effective way to stop someone is to fire a bullet into his central nervous system. It is up to God and the paramedics as to whether the man dies. Your job is to stop the deadly threat, and the most effective way to do that is to make the threat die (emphasis added). 

In the interview, Grossman makes it seem that killing really, really, really is the last resort.  In the course, killing is the best—and maybe the first—way to encounter a threatening man. (He seems only to refer to men as police officers and as criminals.) Rather than train police forces how to deescalate violent situations and spare the citizenry of a traumatic incident, Grossman’s primary objective in the course is to protect the police from the trauma of their likely killing. “If you do the rationalization and acceptance ahead of time,” Grossman says in the course’s Unit 2, “if you prepare yourself and immerse yourself in the lore and spirit of mature warriors, past and present, then the lawful, legitimate use of deadly force does not have to be a self-destructive or traumatic event.” 

This transformation of US law enforcement into righteous warriors and residents into enemy insurgents is observably perilous.  Peters comments that Grossman’s course “does not stop to consider that treating the ‘war on crime’ like an actual war tacitly encourages cops to take less care with the lives of their ‘enemies.’” Some data even finds a noticeable link among psychological militarization, access to military weapons, and the increases in the expected number of killings by law enforcement.  Researcher Edward Lawson found in a 2018 nationwide study that there were higher instances of police killings in units that participated in the 1033 Program than those that did not.  Though he says there is not a directly causal link between equipment and killings, “if the agency as a whole is more psychologically militarized, that agency will pursue more military equipment and will also kill more civilians.”

So what?

There is a word for this combination of warrior weapons and psychology among law enforcement: paramilitarism.  Military hardware and training make law enforcement officers look and behave like armed forces occupiers, not protectors of the peace.  This seeming occupation breeds fear and mistrust in the community. 

“Defund the police” has become the mantra for those objecting to the police killings of people like George Floyd, Tamir Rice, and Breonna Taylor.  But what is the responsibility of the Department of Defense in arming and de facto training police to treat residents as enemy insurgents?  How is the dispersal of weapons of war monitored by the US military, and how is its use regulated?  And how is the Commander-in-Chief—the president—accountable for ensuring that LEAs are behaving and acting responsibly when they are armed with military weapons?

With the 1208 program, in 1990 President George H. W. Bush (1989-1993) temporarily began the required transfer of military weaponry to LEAs for drug enforcement.  President Bill Clinton (1993-2001) expanded the program in 1997 into its current form, the 1033 program, made it permanent, and included LEAs countering terrorism.  Clinton also instituted the 1122 program, the program that permits local and state LEAs to purchase equipment at federal rates.  This program has since become law. Under President George W. Bush (2001-2009) and during the 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, militarization of the police via the 1033 program was vastly inflated with both tactics and more and more advanced weaponry available.  After nearly twenty years of the 1033 and 1122 programs, it looked like police militarizing was to be the norm.

But in 2015, President Barack Obama (2009-2017) made waves by issuing an Executive Order mandating that the federal government increase regulation of both provision and training in the 1033 program.  The Order reads:

The Federal Government must ensure that careful attention is paid to standardizing procedures governing its provision of controlled equipment and funds for controlled equipment to LEAs. Moreover, more must be done to ensure that LEAs have proper training regarding the appropriate use of controlled equipment, including training on the protection of civil rights and civil liberties, and are aware of their obligations under Federal nondiscrimination laws when accepting such equipment (emphasis added).   

Though this change was mandated only by executive order and not law, there was hope that armed-as-if-for-combat local law enforcement agencies would not be the norm.

In 2017 and in accord with his campaign promise, President Trump rescinded Obama’s executive order, restoring the 1033 program to its previous post-Forever-Wars bloated provision and warrior mentality training practices. The United States was back to what is, in effect, martial law.

With yet another executive order, however, in 2022 President Biden went even further than Obama, initiating “police reform” that limits some of the most war-like of weaponry going to LEAs and mandates training that both limits the militarized use of force and also emphasizes de-escalation.  Some senators argue that Biden has gone too far:  “We cannot understand why any elected official would want to stop law enforcement from safely doing their jobs other than to be able to tell their base of voters they are defunding the police.” Other senators exhort Biden to end the 1033 program altogether.

Clearly, the arming of American law enforcement and residents is a contentious issue.  Dueling (for lack of a better word) executive orders will not end the sense that the United States is always in a condition of martial law.  As long as residents can freely carry weapons of all sorts and law enforcement carry war weaponry while presuming that residents are armed enemies, martial law—whether declared or not—will prevail.

Sadly, this escalation of armaments reminds me of the longstanding nuclear weapons theory, MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. This theory says that “neither the United States nor its enemies will ever start a nuclear war because the other side will retaliate massively and unacceptably.” Such a situation is supposed to provide stability.  But it also requires that all sides have the number and quality of nuclear weapons needed to “retaliate massively and unacceptably.”  If one country increases the number or quality of its weapons, to maintain “stability” the others will, too.

I’m afraid that this is where we are, trying unsuccessfully to maintain the stability of weaponry, not between distinct nuclear powers but among American NRA-influenced residents and paramilitarized police. With as many as 474 million guns available to American residents, more than 8,200 federal, state and local LEAs from 49 states and four U.S. territories acquiring free materials and weaponry from the 1033 program, and all fifty states and their local LEAs, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Mariana Islands eligible to purchase weapons through the 1122 program, it is no wonder that we are an arsenal nation. 

In such a wild-west condition, can armed-for-war police officers be objective, fair, and just?  Are they the “good guys with a gun”?  Or are they only trying to keep themselves alive within the fog of war?