Is it a good idea to arm our police departments with surplus military equipment?

Follow this link to the original source: "Army: Tanks for Nothing"

In the latest issue of our affiliated publication, The New American magazine, we report on the rise of the surveillance state in America. The widening effort to monitor the activities of citizens and the increasing propensity for agencies at the national level to aggregate citizen data in massive databases and to keep lengthy and secretive "watch lists" points to a fundamental problem in society between government and the citizens it represents that threatens to destroy, or at least seriously damage, the Republic — if, that is, it isn't stopped.

The problem is one of trust. As author Dennis Behreandt points out in the TNA exclusive, "Monitoring Americans," "across the country, in ways sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious, government seems increasingly suspicious of its citizens and Americans as a result are coming under an increasing amount of surveillance."

Another consequence of the apparently growing government distrust of American citizens is the ongoing effort to transform America's local police into paramilitary urban commando units that have increasing ties to federal authorities instead of to local citizens. A continuing aspect of that effort is the transfer of military equipment to local police forces.

As Reason magazine's Radley Balko points out, that transfer of equipment has been going on for years. According to Balko, "The Pentagon giveaway program began in the late 1980s, and is almost certainly responsible for the dramatic rise in the number of SWAT teams across the country, which led to the 1500 percent increase in the number of total deployments over the last 25 years, and to the increasing use of paramilitary tactics for nonviolent crimes."

Those in favor of giving the surplus military equipment to local police departments, however, seem to have a solid argument. If criminals are now more aggressive and better armed than before, especially in an age when Communist insurgent inspired gangs like MS-13 are running amok in our cities, then why not give them the best equipment, things like tanks and armor and the latest weaponry, and let them take the bad guys down?

Militarizing the police in this way, however, distorts their purpose and confuses it with that of the military. As Balko correctly observes, the purpose of the military is to wage war. The purpose of the police is to serve and protect the citizens. Confuse the two and you risk turning peaceful neighborhoods into battlefields. "Outfit domestic police officers in military clothing, arm them with military gear, train them in military tactics taught by ex-military personnel, then tell them they're fighting a 'war' on drugs, and we shouldn't be the least bit surprised when they treat city streets like battlefields," Balko observes.

Ironically, it may be that the "war" in Iraq is giving our real military the chance to let us know about the dangers represented by our increasingly militarized police at home. Balko quotes a section from Evan Wright's book Generation Kill in which Wright discusses the attitudes of career Marines in Iraq toward Marine reserve units made up largely of stateside law enforcement officers "from LAPD cops to DEA agents to air marshals."

According to one gunnery sergeant quoted by Wright who observed reserve units, "Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They put cattle horns on their Humvees. They'd roll into these hamlets, doing shows of force—kicking down doors, doing sweeps—just for the [expletive] of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader was this beat cop... He's like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday and everybody calls him 'Napoleon.'"

Clearly there is a problem with policing in the United States. But it is critical to keep in mind that the problem does not lie with the majority of the nation’s individual police officers, most of whom do remarkable work every day in helping people, investigating crimes and saving lives. We badly need our independent local police and we need to support them and protect them from shortsighted policies that will undermine their effectiveness as law enforcement officers.

Arguably, the most dangerous such policy is the one that calls for giving our officers military gear. That's a practice that should stop: We need local police, not local paramilitary troops.

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