A few nights ago, my wife and I went for a walk. We noticed a helicopter that flew over once, twice, many times, circling lower and lower each time. It seemed to be a police helicopter and we theorized that the police were looking for someone but this was an extraordinary intrusion. Police helicopters may routinely patrol the skies over major cities like Chicago, Los Angeles or New York, but we were not even aware there were police helicopters in our city of about 80,000 people.
We met a friend, and as we talked about the situation, my wife noticed that a police car had stopped at the intersection nearest our home. A few minutes later, a jeep with Border Patrol markings pulled up to ask us whether we had seen a man running past. We had not, but the Border Patrol presence changed our perception of the situation. Suddenly, the police were not out in force looking for a suspect in a possibly violent crime, they were pursuing someone whose offense was that he lacked proof of legal residence in the United States.
Apart from the question of justice for immigrants, what is going on here? At least two police agencies, one local and one national, cooperated in pursuit of someone on foot, using police cruisers, an armored SUV and a helicopter. At least four police officers were involved from what we saw, not counting dispatchers and, perhaps, the staff of our local police's Incident Command Center. Since our local paper carried no mention of the incident, it seems reasonable to assume this inter-agency force sought someone whose lack of citizenship or legal residence documentation carries a sentence of up to six months for a first offense. Why the disproportionate deployment of resources?
One answer is simply that the resources are there. Beginning about forty years ago, local police forces across the country created Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, President Nixon declared and his successors perpetuated the “war on drugs”. Now we also have a “war on terror”. The two “wars” have become the justification for federal provision of surplus military equipment to local police forces and for the provision of military equipment to the Border Patrol, Customs Enforcement Agency and other federal police agencies. Although some of the equipment, like body armor, may be justifiable in certain circumstances, the overall military mindset engendered by their use threatens civil liberty and is directed overwhelmingly against poor people and people of color.
With the equipment, and the accessories, training and vocabulary that come with it, police forces are being integrated into the federal security apparatus that has been much in the news lately for infringing on civil liberties. This time, however, infringement on privacy is the least of concerns. Not surprisingly, local police are using tactics learned from Special Forces as they did at the gallery opening in Detroit reported in the New Yorker earlier this month. By some counts, use of SWAT teams grew astronomically in the last 15 or so years with the onset of the war on terror. Certainly, their role has expanded from limited use in special circumstances, like standoff hostage-taking, to widespread use for more routine police actions, like no-knock warranted searches, with often disastrous results for all involved.
The ACLU and a small number of academics and journalists have begun to document the trend, its history and causes, and its consequences. The links in this post are a good place to start reading about the issue, but information is not enough, we must begin to dialogue across racial and ethnic lines about the militarization of domestic police forces and the consolidation of police authority under the executive branch of the federal government, and then we must begin acting, advocating for reforms in our communities as well as at the state and national level.
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