Militarizing the police

One of the jobs I had after leaving the Tulsa Police Department was being the Criminal Justice Planning Director of the North Central Planning Commission in Beloit, Kansas. That position and others like it all over the country came about as the result of a federal program called the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) and a sister program, the Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), both passed by Congress in the late '60s. LEEP allowed police officers to go to college after receiving loans from the federal government. The loans would be forgiven at a rate of 20 percent for each year served on the department. So a four-year college education could be obtained completely free if you served on the department for five years. Even though I took advantage of the LEEP program, I wasn't familiar with what LEAA did until I took the criminal justice planning position.

I was responsible for coordinating local police requests for funding or hardware in my eight-county district with the LEAA program. The requests made by local police chiefs were a real eye-opener because they wanted everything they could get. There was no opposition to government-provided goodies as long as they got some of the goodies and it's much the same today.

One police chief in a town of less than a thousand people applied for and received a helicopter for traffic control. Armored vehicles and high-powered automatic weapons were also requested and granted in most cases. In cases where they weren't, it was only because the regional planning director did not approve of the request and that proved deadly for his career.

That should have been obvious to these guys from the beginning, because when I was selected as a finalist, my interview committee was composed entirely of police chiefs in the eight-county region I would serve and I assume this was the case for other planning commissions as well. My job was to help the chiefs get what they wanted from the federal government, so if a planning commissioner didn't approve of a request, he was quickly dismissed from his job and someone else was hired. It didn't take long for LEAA to be overwhelmed by requests for practically anything the police chiefs could think of and it wasn't long after that before the agency was defunded by Congress.

Today, a similar scenario is going on and the federal government is behind this one, too.

Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has provided $35 billion to local police throughout the country to help buy weapons for "the war on terror."

In addition, the Pentagon has supplied police departments with $4.2 billion of surplus armored vehicles, rifles and other equipment as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down. Police departments essentially obtain all of this for free, only being required to pay shipping charges.

The Utah Highway Patrol owns a 55,000 pound mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle (MRAP) complete with a gunner's turret. Other weapons obtained by police departments are tanks with 360-degree rotating turrets, battering rams and automatic weapons.

What do the police do with all this military weaponry? Unfortunately, most of it is used against Americans in their own homes. The first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team was created by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1967 and was reserved only for the most extreme circumstances: riots, hostage scenarios and active-shooter or sniper situations. Today there are some 124 SWAT raids conducted daily and only 7 percent of them meet the original LAPD criteria.

According to the current edition of The Week magazine, 62 percent of the raids are conducted for drug searches, many of them based on tips from unreliable informants. Most are undertaken to investigate non-violent offenses.

In Orlando, Florida in 2010, heavily-armed SWAT teams raided nine barbershops and arrested 34 people for barbering without a license. In 2011, an Arizona SWAT team riding in military vehicles, including a tank driven by special deputy and action movie star Steven Seagal, drove straight into the living room of an unarmed man suspected of staging cockfights. Incidents like these are laughable but many aren't. Numerous people, including children, have been killed in these no-knock raids because of the panic and confusion that results from them.

Quoting again from The Week magazine, Maryland is one of only two states with a law requiring its police to track their raids.

That transparency bill came about in 2009 after the high-profile botched raid on the mayor of Berwyn Heights, during which his two dogs were shot dead.

The bill was vigorously opposed by every police group in the state.

We can't have lawlessness by the police anymore than we can have it by private citizens.

The citizens are monitored and controlled by the police but who monitors and controls them?