Radley Balko - Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of Americas Police Forces

RISE OF THE
WARRIOR COP

The Militarization of
Americas Police Forces

RADLEY BALKO

PublicAffairs
New York

RISE OF THE
WARRIOR COP

Copyright 2013 by Radley Balko.

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

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Book design by Linda Mark

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Balko, Radley.

Rise of the warrior cop : the militarization of Americas police forces / Radley Balko.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61039-212-9 (e-book)

1. PoliceSpecial weapons and tactics unitsUnited States. 2. PoliceUnited States. I. Title.

HV8080.S64B354 2013

363.20973dc23

2013009304

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Ive always felt that Id never officially feel like a writer until I could see a book Id written sitting on my bookshelf. So I owe a lot of thanks to the people who have helped make that happen.

First, of course, thank you to my family and friends who have supported and encouraged me over the years. Thanks also to my agent, Howard Yoon, and my editor at PublicAffairs, Brandon Proia, for getting this specific book into print. I should also acknowledge Peter Kraska, whose scholarly research on SWAT teams has provided the empirical data to document this trend. Police militarization has largely been fueled by the drug war, so this book also owes a debt to Dan Baum, whose meticulously reported Smoke and Mirrors is the be-all, end-all history of the drug war through the 1990s. Thanks also to Samuel Walker, Norm Stamper, Tom Angell, Victoria Dunham, Killian Lapeyre, Jessica Greene, Drew Johnson, and Dan Wang, who contributed to this book with research, comments, referrals, and/or suggestions.

Other thanks go to Robin Wallace and Nick Schulz, the first two editors to publish me regularly. Thanks to P. J. Doland for hosting my blog for ten yearswhere I first reported many of the incidents youll read about in this book. Thanks to Ed Crane and David Boaz at the Cato Institute, who published my white paper on SWAT teams, gave me my first full-time job as a writer, and provided a terrific platform from which to write about this issue. Thanks also to current and former Cato folk Susan Chamberlin, Tim Lynch, and Gene Healy. Thanks to Nick Gillespie, who gave me my first journalism job at Reason magazine, and to Matt Welch, David Nott, Jesse Walker, and my other former colleagues at Reason. Thanks especially to Jacob Sullum, whose editing made me a better writer.

Other media/Internet/journalism people to whom Im grateful for supporting, promoting, and publishing my work over the years: Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, Ryan Grim, Arianna Huffington, Mark Frauenfelder, John Stossel, John Tierney, Ed Brayton, Emily Bazelon, and Dahlia Lithwick.

Finally, a group of people Id like to personally thank for a variety of different reasons, personal and professional: Bobbie Murphy, Alyona Minkovski, David Pfaff, Jessie Creel, Liliana Segura, Stacie Moats, Courtney Knapp, Marta Rose, Kate Klonick, David Boeyink, and my dad, Terry Balko.

There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

JAMES MADISON

Are cops constitutional?

That may seem like an odd questionperhaps even a little nutty. Police forces have been part of the American criminal justice system since an eight-man department was established in Boston 175 years ago and the first large department was created seven years later in New York City. There has never been a serious constitutional challenge to the general authority of police or to the establishment of police forces, sheriffs departments, or other law enforcement agencies, and its unlikely there ever would be. Any federal court would undoubtedly have little patience for such a challenge. And any hypothetical world where police were ruled unconstitutional would descend into chaos, probably rather quickly.

But in a 2001 article for the Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal, the legal scholar and civil liberties activist Roger Roots posed just that question. the very least, he argues, police departments, powers, and practices today violate the documents spirit and intent. Under the criminal justice model known to the Framers, professional police officers were unknown, Roots writes.

The general public had broad law enforcement powers, and only the executive functions of the law (e.g. the execution of writs, warrants, and orders) were performed by constables or sheriff (who might call upon the community for assistance). Initiation and investigation of criminal cases was nearly the exclusive province of private persons.... The advent of modern policing has greatly altered the balance of power between the citizen and the state in a way that would have been seen as constitutionally invalid by the Founders.

Rootss argument may not be practical, but its certainly provocative. On at least one point, most criminologists agree with him: no one can say for sure whether the Founders would have approved of modern policing, but its relatively certain that they wouldnt have recognized it. Criminologist and historian Samuel Walker writes in his book Popular Justice that in colonial America most of the modern institutions of todays criminal justice system, the uniformed police, prisons, probation, parole... did not exist at all. The colonies did have appointed sheriffs and constables, and some also had marshals, but the duties associated with those jobs were largely administrative. Most were not salaried positions; instead, they received fees for tasks like serving subpoenas and collecting taxes. Since there were no fees associated with enforcing the criminal laws, for most sheriffs and constables that task was a low priority. Sheriffs did oversee the jails, but jails were primarily used to hold defendants until trial. Incarceration as punishment was rare.