Judging from the two excerpts published so far on Salon.com, Radley Balko’s new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces is a much-needed wake-up call about the dangerously increasing power of the police in the United States.

The rapidly-growing trend of having local police departments behave more like a military force than a law enforcement agency is terrifying. Unfortunately, as Balko explains in great detail, not only is it currently legal in many cases, it is being encouraged by new policies and laws.  The federal government continues to ask more of local police, local governments love their new powers, the police seem to relish their increasing ability to play “SWAT,” and the judiciary almost always gives approval. Penalties for abuse of power and unjustified killing are light and rare.

What this all accomplishes, other than needless deaths and rising anger against government, are good questions.

Clearly, as Balko writes, “The new warrior cop is out of control.” He gives many examples of SWAT teams gone wild– folks sitting in their living room suddenly facing doors busted down by men dressed in full riot gear waving assault rifles, their dogs being killed in front of them, and orders to lie down on the floor with guns being pressed against their heads—all by people who have not identified themselves.

What happened to Cheye Calvo, the 33 year-old mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, is a typical story:

As Calvo took the dogs out for a walk the evening of July 29, 2008, his mother-in-law told him that a package had been delivered a few minutes earlier. He figured it was something he had ordered for his garden. “On the walk, I noticed a few black SUVs in the neighborhood, but thought little of it except to wave to the drivers,” he would later recall. When Calvo and the dogs returned, he picked up the package, brought it inside, then went upstairs to change for his meeting.

The next thing Calvo remembers is the sound of his mother-in-law screaming. He ran to the window and saw heavily armed men clad in black rushing his front door. Next came the explosion. He’d later learn that this was when the police blew open his front door. Then there was gunfire. Then boots stomping the floor. Then more gunfire. Calvo, still in his boxers, screamed, “I’m upstairs, please don’t shoot!” He was instructed to walk downstairs with his hands in the air, the muzzles of two guns pointed directly at him. He still didn’t know it was the police. . . “At the bottom of the stairs, they bound my hands, pulled me across the living room, and forced me to kneel on the floor in front of my broken door. I thought it was a home invasion. I was fearful that I was about to be executed.” I later asked Calvo what might have happened if he’d had a gun in his home for self-defense. His answer: “I’d be dead.” In another interview, he would add, “The worst thing I could have done was defend my home.”

And by the way, the police shot and killed both of Calvo’s dogs.

Want another?

Jonathan Ayers was a Georgia pastor who made the mistake of counseling and ministering to troubled women who also happened to be under investigation for drug offenses. In 2009, an undercover team of cops who had the woman under surveillance saw Ayers pick her up and give her some money. Ayers was actually giving her the cash out of his wallet to help pay her rent, so she wouldn’t be evicted. But suspecting they now had a more upscale suspect, the police followed Ayers as he left the motel where the woman was staying. They followed him to a convenience store, where withdrew some cash from an ATM.

When Ayers returned to his car, a black SUV screeched into the parking lot, and a team of narcotics cops toting guns and dressed in street clothes ran at his car. Ayers threw the car into reverse and attempted to escape. The police opened fire, killing Ayers. According to a nurse at the hospital where he died, Ayers’ last words were that he thought he was about to be robbed. . .

[The] Georgia Bureau of Investigation. . . cleared the cops of any wrongdoing. The report concluded that Ayers was mostly to blame.

Many of the examples Balko writes about relate to people under suspicion for drug use, but there are also stories of “investigations” for gambling, child pornography, serving alcohol to minors, and other violations.  Balko is careful to say that illegal activities may very well have been underway, but questions the need for military-style home invasions and whether proper procedures, such as search warrants, and identifying as police, were followed.

One growing but deeply troubling trend described in depth by Balko is the use of “administrative searches,” in which police departments actually use SWAT teams supposedly to enforce business regulations.  Three years ago in Florida, for example, “[S]heriff’s deputies raided several black-and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. More raids followed in September and October. The Orlando Sentinel reported that police held barbers and customers at gunpoint and put some in handcuffs, while they turned the shops inside out. The police raided a total of nine shops and arrested thirty-seven people. By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel that police asked them where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, thirty-four of the thirty-seven arrests were for ‘barbering without a license,’ a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida.”

Amazingly, “administrative searches” do not require a search warrant, because they are just “license inspections.”  And these outrageous actions have been upheld by the courts.

Don’t think that the police ever even apologize for mistaken raids, shooting dogs, and killing innocent people. In almost all cases, they refuse to admit mistakes, and usually blame the innocent citizens for their victimization.  It is as if they are saying, “Of course they should have known we were the police when we burst in the door at 2:00 in the morning wearing face masks and all-black clothing and shooting our guns!”

The militarization of the police has grown to include “riot control” duties, which in reality mean stopping legal, peaceful protests at large events such as conventions or world summits. Occupy protestors have felt the wrath of these squads.  No longer is breaking the law necessary to be arrested. Just watching a legal activity and holding the potential to do something illegal is all that is needed now to be rounded up at gunpoint and carted off to the station.

Such serious abuse of  police power should be of great concern to everyone across the political spectrum. Whether you worry about government being too powerful or want to protect civil liberties and the Bill of Rights, the turning of local police departments into quasi-military units whose default position is to make investigations into warrantless life-threatening SWAT raids should be enough to make your blood boil. Both the left and right should come together to fight the dangers of the growth of these actions.

As Balko writes,

So long as partisans are only willing to speak out against aggressive, militarized police tactics when they’re used against their own and are dismissive or even supportive of such tactics when used against those whose politics they dislike, it seems unlikely that the country will achieve enough of a political consensus to begin to slow down the trend.

The post Militarized police force: No longer just a threat, it’s here appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of the many disturbing trends since 9/11 is the steady militarization of our domestic police. Thanks to loads of money and equipment funneled through Homeland Security to local communities, local police are increasingly using military weaponry designed for “combating terrorism” for everyday police work.

According to Rizer and Hartmann writing for the Atlantic, before 9/11, small-town police officers had a standard shotgun, and possibly a high-powered rifle, and a surplus M-16, for use by the supervising officer. But now, police officers “routinely walk the beat armed with assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms.” Both large and small police departments have “acquired bazookas, machine guns, and even mini-tanks for use in domestic police work.”

Besides local police departments stocking up on military weaponry, military training is causing the police to exhibit more aggressive behavior. One recent example is the assault with military grade pepper spray, by a member of a university police force, on peaceful student protestors who were exercising their first amendment rights. Another is the Tampa police rolling out a tank-like vehicle at an Occupy encampment in a park in downtown Tampa.

The Tampa police deployed the massive 12-ton vehicle—one that is supposed to be used for rescuing people in a natural disaster or during a terrorist attack—to intimidate people at a small-scale peaceful protest. This vehicle was purchased from the military and paid for with a Federal security grant, according to the City of Tampa website. It was also underwritten by local corporations. (The city also purchased another smaller amphibious, bulletproof military vehicle equipped with a rotatable 360-degree platform, which can be used to mount a weapon.)

Instead of walking the beat and communicating with residents, police are wearing bulletproof vests, riot gear, dark goggles, and masks even for routine work. S.W.A.T. teams are no longer used for extreme situations, but are used for everyday policing, including serving warrants. Instead of connecting with the community, the police are separating themselves psychologically from the communities they serve. As they become more like the military, they take on a dangerous mindset reserved for soldiers—one that is focused on killing an enemy.

Rizer and Hartmann report that we are witnessing a fundamental change in the nature of law enforcement. When a police officer takes someone into custody, they  consider him or her innocent until proven guilty. They are expected to protect the civil liberties of all citizens, even the vilest of criminals. Lethal violence is an absolute last resort.  Soldiers, on the other hand, are trained to identify two groups—the enemy and the non-enemy. Once identified, they kill the enemy. The blurring of the line between police and military is influencing, in a negative way, how the police engage with people in their communities.

This blurring also opens up the country to other dangers. With local police being given military equipment, weapons and training, there is little difference between them and the military itself. Thus, it makes it easier for an administration, if it so choses, to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 effectively eliminating the need to declare martial law. This is not a good trend. In mid November, 18 cities coordinated attacks on Occupy encampments. The origin of those coordinated attacks is not known at this time.

Glenn Greenwald, writing at Salon, sees a relationship between the growing militarization of the police and the growing economic unrest in the country:

It was only a matter of time before a coordinated police crackdown was imposed to end the Occupy encampments. Law enforcement officials and policy-makers in America know full well that serious protests — and more — are inevitable given the economic tumult and suffering the U.S. has seen over the last three years (and will continue to see for the foreseeable future). A country cannot radically reduce quality-of-life expectations, devote itself to the interests of its super-rich, and all but eliminate its middle class without triggering sustained citizen fury.

The reason the U.S. has para-militarized its police forces is precisely to control this type of domestic unrest, and it’s simply impossible to imagine its not being deployed in full against a growing protest movement aimed at grossly and corruptly unequal resource distribution. As Madeleine Albright said when arguing for U.S. military intervention in the Balkans: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” That’s obviously how governors, big-city Mayors and Police Chiefs feel about the stockpiles of assault rifles, SWAT gear, hi-tech helicopters, and the coming-soon drone technology lavished on them in the wake of the post/9-11 Security State explosion, to say nothing of the enormous federal law enforcement apparatus that, more than anything else, resembles a standing army which is increasingly directed inward.

Chi Birmingham and Alex S. Vitale, in a recent art Opinion piece in the The New York Times, provide a visual diagram charting the evolution of police uniforms over the last decades. To view it, click here. The days of “Officer Friendly” visiting a local grade school appear to be over.

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