(NEW YORK) MintPress – Police in North Dakota borrowed a $154 million Predator drone from Homeland Security to arrest a family who refused to return six cows that wandered onto their farm.
Police in Arkansas announced plans to patrol streets wearing full SWAT gear and carrying AR-15 assault rifles.
Drone manufacturers may offer police remote-controlled drones with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers and tear gas.
An Arizona SWAT team defended shooting an Iraq War veteran 60 times during a drug raid, but had to retract its claim that the veteran shot first.
The New York City Police Department disclosed that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy Movement protesters.
These are just a handful of the chilling stories that the Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) points to as evidence that use of military machinery, such as tanks and grenades, as well as counter-terrorism tactics, encourage overly aggressive policing, with often devastating consequences.
That is why it has now launched a nationwide campaign aimed at assessing the scope of the militarization of police in the United States.
“We’ve known for a while that American neighborhoods are increasingly being policed by cops armed with the weapons and tactics of war,” said Kara Kansky, senior counsel at the ACLU’s Center for Justice, which is coordinating the investigation. “The aim of this is to find out just how pervasive this is, and to what extent federal funding is incentivizing this trend.”
To do so, ACLU affiliates in 23 states have filed more than 255 public records requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to determine the extent to which local police departments are using federally-subsidized military technology and tactics that are traditionally used overseas.
The ACLU says it wants to know as much as possible about the type of training given to local SWAT officers, as well as information about the types of technology used by agencies around the country.
Through the FOIA requests, the ACLU hopes to learn what types of weapons have been used, who they’ve been used on and what the end result has been. They also want documentation pertaining to the growing use of GPS technology, surveillance drones and any agreements between local police departments and the National Guard.
The ACLU is also interested in any relationships between small law enforcement units and the US Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.
Affiliates filed a second request with state National Guards asking for information on cooperation between local police departments and the National Guard counterdrug program, as well as incidents of contact between the National Guard and civilians.
“The American people deserve to know how much our local police are using military weapons and tactics for everyday policing,” said Allie Bohm, ACLU advocacy and policy strategist.
“The militarization of local police is a threat to Americans’ right to live without fear of military-style intervention in their daily lives, and we need to make sure these resources and tactics are deployed only with rigorous oversight and strong legal protections.”
Rapid buildup
The phenomenon began in the late 1960s, when Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates decided to deploy a SWAT team in response to the Watts riots and a few shooting incidents for which he thought ordinary officers were not sufficiently prepared.
The nation then watched as SWAT teams successfully confronted a Black Panther holdout in 1969 and then the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1973, and the concept became popular in other cities facing the social unrest and protests that were spreading at the time, according to The Huffington Post.
A New York Times investigation found that from Gates’ initial team in LA, the number of SWAT teams in the United States grew to 500 by 1975, and by 1982, nearly 60 percent of American cities with 50,000 people or more had a SWAT team.
Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University, later conducted two highly publicized surveys of police departments across the country.
He found that by 1995, nearly 90 percent of cities with 50,000 or more people had a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team, and many had several such teams.
Even in smaller towns, those with 25,000 to 50,000 people, Kraska found that that the number of SWAT teams increased by more than 300 percent between 1984 and 1995. By 2000, 75 percent of those town also had their own SWAT team.
Kraska estimated that the total number of SWAT raids in America jumped from just a few hundred per year in the 1970s, to a few thousand by the early 1980s, to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s.
One of the main reasons, said the Post, was that during the Reagan administration, Congress endorsed several of his policies encouraging cooperation and mutual training between the military and police agencies. Reagan also persuaded the Pentagon to start loaning or giving out extra military gear to local law enforcement agencies.
In 1988, Congress created the Byrne grant program, which gives federal money to local police departments and prosecutors for various criminal justice purposes, but much of it has been earmarked for anti-drug activities. Competition among police departments for the pool of cash meant that anti-drug policing became a priority.
Then, during the Clinton administration, Congress passed the so-called “1033 program,” which formalized Reagan’s directive for the Pentagon to share surplus military gear with domestic police agencies.
It also passed the Community-Oriented Policing Services program (COPS) to promote less confrontation with the public, but the money was often used to start SWAT teams instead.
After that, Kraska found, millions of pieces of military equipment designed for use on a battlefield — including machine guns, tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and bayonets — were transferred to local police departments and SWAT teams.
Kraska’s studies, however, were the last major effort to quantify the police militarization trend, which is what the ACLU would like to accomplish.
Updating the data
It may discover some eye-opening information. Although the administration of George W. Bush began scaling down the Byrne and COPS programs in the early 2000s as a means of leaving law enforcement to the states and municipalities, the Obama administration has resurrected both of them.
The Byrne program got a $2 billion funding increase as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the COPS program got $1.55 billion that same year, up 250 percent from its 2008 budget.
Which could make the ACLU’s task a bit tougher. “My experience is that they’ll have a very difficult time getting comprehensive, forthright information,” Kransky said. “If the goal here is to impose some transparency, you have to understand that’s not what the SWAT industry wants.”
The affiliates that filed public records requests are Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Dansky said the organization is prepared to go to court if necessary to get access to the information.
“If we need to challenge these departments on the information about their SWAT teams, we’ll do that. And if these police agencies do refuse to release this public information to our affiliates, that in itself is something the public should know.
Once the ACLU does get the information, it says, it will analyze the figures and recommend policies to minimize the effects of police criminalization on civil liberties.
“We’re also concerned that these tactics are disproportionately used against poor people, and in communities of color,” said the ACLU, something the organization wants to address as well.
“I wish the ACLU success,” said Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md., who was the victim of a highly-publicized mistaken raid on his home in which a Prince George’s County SWAT team shot and killed his two black labradors.
“And I suspect that once they force the police agencies to cooperate, they’ll find that this problem is even more dramatic and pronounced than most people know.”