Police are transforming

By John W. WHITEHEAD

Special to The Vindicator

Take a close look at your local police officers, the ones who patrol your neighborhoods and ensure the safety of your roadways. Chances are they look less and less like the benevolent keepers of the peace who patrolled Andy Griffith’s Mayberry and more like inflexible extensions of the military. As journalist Benjamin Carlson points out, “In today’s Mayberry, Andy Griffith and Barney Fife could be using grenade launchers and a tank to keep the peace.” This is largely owing to the increasing arsenal of weapons available to police units, the changing image of the police within communities, and the growing idea that the police can and should use any means necessary to maintain order.

Moreover, as an investigative report by Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz reveals, in communities large and small across America, local law enforcement are arming themselves to the teeth with weapons previously only seen on the battlefield. “Many police, including beat cops, now routinely carry assault rifles. Combined with body armor and other apparel, many officers look more and more like combat troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Jackboots

To our detriment, local police — clad in jackboots, helmets and shields and wielding batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, and assault rifles — have increasingly come to resemble occupying forces in our communities. “Today,” notes Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and associate editor of The Wall Street Journal, “17,000 local police forces are equipped with such military equipment as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers, battering rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision, rappelling gear and armored vehicles. Some have tanks. ”

Yet appearances to the contrary, the American police force is not supposed to be a branch of the military, nor is it a private security force for the reigning political faction. It is an aggregation of the countless local civilian units that exist soley to serve and protect the citizens of each and every American community.

It is particularly telling that whereas in the past, law enforcement strove to provide a sense of security, trust, and comfort, the impression conveyed today is one of power, dominance and inflexible authority. However, this transformation of local police into military units did not happen overnight. It cannot be traced back to a single individual or event. Rather, the evolution has been so subtle that most American citizens were hardly even aware of it taking place.

What began with the militarization of the police in the 1980s during the government’s war on drugs has snowballed into a full-fledged integration of military weaponry, technology and tactics into police protocol. As Becker and Schulz report, more than $34 billion in federal government grants made available to local police agencies in the wake of 9/11 “have fueled a rapid, broad transformation of police operations ... across the country. ... Police departments around the U.S. have transformed into small army-like forces.”

For instance, police in Cobb County, Ga., have an amphibious tank and Richland County, S.C., police have a machine-gun-equipped armored personnel carrier called “The Peacemaker” the likes of which had previously only been seen in war zones. The 50-person police department in Oxford, Ala., has acquired more than $2 million worth of equipment in recent years, including M-16s and remote-controlled robots. One popular piece of equipment, the BearCat, a “16,000-pound bulletproof truck equipped with battering rams, gun ports, tear-gas dispensers and radiation detectors” which costs $237,000, has been sold to over 500 local agencies.

Drones

Police agencies are also beginning to use drones — pilotless, remote-controlled aircraft that have been used extensively in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—domestically. AeroVironment Inc., a manufacturer of drones, intends to sell 18,000 5-pound drones controlled via tablet computer to police departments throughout the country. They are also touting the “Switchblade,” a small, one-use drone, that has the ability to track a person from the air and then fly down to their level and explode.

With violent crime nationwide at a 40-year low, most of this equipment is not only largely unnecessary but is completely incongruous with the security needs of smaller communities. Yet whether or not the use of such sophisticated and overblown militarized equipment is justified, many local police units still feel compelled to put it to use. Hence, the widespread misuse of military equipment by law enforcement is a growing and well-documented problem that has resulted in the deaths of innocent people, nonviolent offenders and police officers.

As Paul Craig Roberts makes clear in his article, “The Empire Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry,” local law enforcement is becoming an extension of the federal government.

John Whitehead, a constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book is “The Freedom Wars” (TRI Press).