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(Part one of my interview with Radley Balko is here.)
You've criticized the militarization of law enforcement. It's a topic The Atlantic covered
in the aftermath of the Columbine shooting, when police departments all
over America began encouraging a SWAT team mentality among regular
officers. Why is this war mentality a bad thing? Aren't there heavily
armed bad guys who are literally causing war-like casualties in urban
neighborhoods?
The military is trained to kill people and break things -- to
annihilate a foreign enemy. The police are charged with protecting our
rights while securing the peace. Those are two very different missions,
and it's dangerous to conflate them. But that seems to be what's
happening.
I documented this rise of militarism in a 2006 paper I wrote for the Cato Institute.
In addition to the dramatic rise in SWAT teams in this country (about a
1,500 percent increase in the last 30 years), there's also an
increasingly militaristic mindset taking hold in many police
departments--an "us versus them" kind of mentality that pits cops
against the neighborhoods they control.
We're dressing police officers in military attire, giving them
military-grade weaponry, training them in military tactics, then
sending them into American cities and neighborhoods and telling them
they're fighting a war--be it the war on drugs, or a more generic war
on crime. That's not a healthy development for a free society. People
who live in high-crime areas are still American citizens with rights.
They aren't the foreign residents of an enemy nation.
The argument that we need to arm cops like soldiers because the
modern criminal is increasingly well-armed is appealing, but doesn't
seem to be backed by much evidence. The idea seems to be driven by a
couple of high-profile but largely anomalous incidents, most notably the 1997 North Hollywood shootout.
But in 2004, the National Institute for Justice released a study
showing that assault weapons are rarely used in actual crimes, and it's
even rarer to find one used in the shooting of a police officer. This
jibes with a study from the 1990s by gun researcher Dave Kopel. In the
Cato paper, I also document several media surveys showing that SWAT and
no-knock raids very rarely turn up high-powered weaponry, even though
the possibility of big guns is often the justification given for their
use. Most of the narcotics cops I've talked to over the years say drug dealers tend to prefer small, easy-to-conceal handguns.
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