Militarization of Police

For our next discussion, we will focus on a topic much in the news lately: the phenomenon of the militarization of police. We will meet to discuss books and other writings on this topic on Sunday, February 7th at 3:30 pm at Kafe Sobaka, 2469 Broadway in Golden Hill.

Over the years and for a number of reasons, law enforcement groups have been increasingly using military equipment to police civilians, which encourages them, some say, to change their tactics to resemble occupying armies more than traditional civilian police forces. As a result, police forces in the US and elsewhere now make use such tactics as intelligence agency-style information gathering aimed at the public and a more aggressive style of law enforcement. Concerns about the militarization of police have been raised by both ends of the political spectrum in the United States, with both the right-of-center/libertarian CATO Institute and the left-of-center American Civil Liberties Union voicing criticisms of the practice.

There are three books we recommend that address this issue from different angles: Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification by Jeff Halper, and Battlefield America: The War on the American People by John W. Whitehead. You are welcome to read any or all of these books to prepare for the discussion, as well as alternative sources of information that you may find on the topic.

1. Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko.
   (This 2014 book is available in paperback from Amazon starting at $7.61 plus shipping. The San Diego library has 4 copies plus more in the Circuit.)

The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other—an enemy.

Today’s armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit—which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers. Nixon’s War on Drugs, Reagan’s War on Poverty, Clinton’s COPS program, the post–9/11 security state under Bush and Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations expanded and empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. And these are just four among a slew of reckless programs.

In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.

2. War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification by Jeff Halper.
   (This 2015 book is available from Amazon for $15.99. The San Diego library does not have any copies but the Circuit does.)

Long-awaited, War Against the People is a powerful indictment of the Israeli state’s “securocratic” war in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Anthropologist and activist Jeff Halper draws on firsthand research to show the pernicious effects of the subliminal form of unending warfare conducted by Israel, an approach that relies on sustaining fear among the populace, fear that is stoked by suggestions that the enemy is inside the city limits, leaving no place truly safe and justifying the intensification of military action and militarization in everyday life. Eventually, Halper shows, the integration of militarized systems—including databases tracking civilian activity, automated targeting systems, unmanned drones, and more—becomes seamless with everyday life. And the Occupied Territories, Halper argues, is a veritable laboratory for that approach. Halper goes on to show how this method of war is rapidly globalizing, as the major capitalist powers and corporations transform militaries, security agencies, and police forces into an effective instrument of global pacification. Simultaneously a deeply researched exposé and a clarion call, War Against the People is a bold attempt to shine the light on the daily injustices visited on a civilian population —and thus hasten their end.

3. Battlefield America: The War on the American People by John W. Whitehead
   (This 2015 book is available for $15 from Amazon. The San Diego library has 3 copies and the Circuit has more.)

[In] the follow-up to his award-winning book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead paints a terrifying portrait of a nation at war with itself and which is on the verge of undermining the basic freedoms guaranteed to the citizenry in the Constitution. Indeed, police have been transformed into extensions of the military, towns and cities have become battlefields, and the American people have been turned into enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.
Yet this police state did not come about overnight. As Whitehead notes, this shift into totalitarianism 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. Yet little by little, police authority expanded, one weapon after another was added to the police arsenal, and one exception after another was made to the standards that have historically restrained police authority. Add to this mix the merger of Internet megacorporations with government intelligence agencies, and you have the making of an electronic concentration camp that not only sees the citizenry as databits but will attempt to control every aspect of their lives. And if someone dares to step out of line, they will most likely find an armed SWAT team at their door.