American Law Enforcement Has Always Been Paramilitary

"American law enforcement is and has always been paramilitary. We've simply seen an escalation, and a very large one, since 9/11 and leading into the Occupy movement as well …. They are a civilian police force but they operate according to a paramilitary organisational arrangement. It's a very heavily command-and-control oriented institution."

- Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief

An investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that some police departments have been transformed into "army-like forces" because of the equipment they use.

... the most visible use of that equipment has come as they dispersed largely peaceful protests like those seen at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In July this year, in the Californian city of Anaheim, police officers looked like they were prepared for war as they surrounded unarmed protesters demonstrating against police brutality.

"What we've been seeing in the last 10 years is even more disturbing .... The level of force that governments, politicians and law enforcement officials are choosing to use is not really based on a realistic assessment of the threat but increasingly based on what sort of political message that they want to send."

Radley Balko, a senior writer at the Huffington Post

How The Drug War and 9/11 Militarized The Police

If The Infrastructure Of A Police State Is Created, It's Only A Matter Of Time Before Those Aggressive Powers Are Used. 

By Heather "Digby" Parton 
November 14, 2011 
Courtesy Of "AlterNet"

What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it's supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?


It looks as though we may be about to find out. The Occupy protests have been mostly peaceful, with a few fairly dramatic exceptions. But the sight of a huge police presence in riot gear is always startling, and tactics that have been honed in Europe (such as "kettling") against anarchist actions have not been as common in the United States as elsewhere. More standard forms of crowd control, such as the aggressive use of pepper spray and "rubber" bullets have so far been the outer limits of the police use of force. But it is hardly the outer limits of the possibilities.

The US has actually been militarising much of its police agencies for the better part of three decades, mostly in the name of the drug war. But 9/11 put that programme on steroids.

Recall that six short weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the US congress passed the PATRIOT Act, a sweeping expansion of domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering capabilities. This legislation gave the government the ability to easily search all forms of communication, eased restrictions on foreign intelligence-gathering at home, gave itself greater power to monitor financial transactions and created entirely new categories of domestic terrorism to which the PATRIOT Act's expanded powers to police could be applied.

It was one of the greatest expansions of government police power in history, an expansion which, after some tweaking, has been mostly validated by the congress and reaffirmed by the courts.

A little more than a week after the PATRIOT Act was passed, President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security to "develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks" and a year later, the Department of Homeland Security was established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002.

Today it is the third-largest government agency, after the departments of defence and veterans' affairs. Aside from the billions the federal government spent on its own agencies, it has disbursed many billions more to various state and local police agencies, ostensibly for the purpose of fighting the terrorist threat.

Campus Police With M-16s

More often, it created new surveillance opportunities for non-terrorist activity. In one notorious case from 2006, it was revealed that Homeland Security had given the remote Alaskan village of Dillingham (population 2,400) $202,000 to purchase surveillance cameras in order to track alleged terrorist activity.

Needless to say, Dillingham was not on any known terrorist's target list, so the only people the surveillance cameras were watching were the citizens. But surveillance wasn't the end of it.

"It wouldn't be surprising to find that swaggering around armed to the teeth and dressed like RoboCop might lead some cops to adopt a more militaristic attitude."

 As reported by Radley Balko in the Huffington Post, a Pentagon programme - started in the 1980s - to give military equipment to local police escalated in the 2000s, with even university campus police receiving everything from M-16s to armoured personnel carriers. Balko quoted one county sheriff saying that he'd use his new Homeland Security-funded SWAT team "for a lot of other purposes, too ... just a multitude of other things".

All over the country, police switched out their traditional uniforms for Battle Dress Uniforms, dubbed by one retired policeman in the Washington Post as "commando-chic" regalia. It wouldn't be surprising to find that swaggering around armed to the teeth and dressed like RoboCop might lead some cops to adopt a more militaristic attitude.

Former San Jose chief of police Joseph McNamara raised these alarms as early as 2006 in the wake of the Sean Bell shooting in New York. He pointed out that the effects of the drug war and 9/11 had led to "an emphasis on 'officer safety' [where] paramilitary training pervades today's policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn't shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed".

Likewise, in the name of "officer safety", the Taser became a common tool in everyday policing, deployed with little knowledge of the effects, and a tendency to Taser first and ask questions later. But over the course of the past decade, the body count grew as it became more and more obvious that tasers were sometimes as deadly as the guns they purported to replace.

'Pain Compliance'

And that's the most prosaic of the new policing toys that are becoming available. Reporter Ando Arick analysed the new generation of weaponry in an article in Harper's called "The Soft-Kill Solution - New Frontiers In Pain Compliance". He recounts a 60 Minutes investigation into a new weapon to be used for what the military said was "crowd control in Iraq".

Yet in military exercises in Georgia, soldiers were dressed as protesters, carrying signs that say "world peace", "love for all" and "peace not war" for some reason. In what was presented as a choice between backing off and shooting into the crowd, the audience was then shown that a "ray gun" was on top of the Humvee.

"An operator squeezes off a blast. The first shot hits them like an invisible punch. The protesters regroup, and he fires again, and again. Finally they’ve had enough. The ray gun drives them away with no harm done."

Except for the repeated "invisible punches", of course. But like the Taser, the whole point of this "pain compliance" is to inflict short-term physical agony on human beings to "induce behavioural modification".

They have developed plans for a flying drone that fires stun darts at suspects, a "Shockwave Area-Denial System", which blankets the area in question with electrified darts, and a wireless Taser projectile with a 100-metre range, helpful for picking off "ringleaders" in unruly crowds.

Would the public balk? Probably not. After all, they've accepted the Taser to such an extent that it's now a staple of movie comedies and viral YouTube videos. The ground has been well-prepared. And after all, just as the government has expanded its police powers and built up its arsenal of "pain compliance" weaponry, the broader culture was lifting the centuries-old taboo against torture.

It was an abstract and obscure debate that took on a surreal cast when it was revealed that early government brainstorming meetings about interrogation tactics at Guantanamo relied heavily on the question, "What would Jack Bauer do?"

Jack Bauer, of course, was a fictional character in the then-popular television show "24", a secret agent who was known for his willingness to break any law and social norm in the pursuit of a ticking time bomb. He was specifically admired for his innovative torture techniques.

This character was a great favourite of high-ranking members of the government - notorious torture memo author John Yoo cited him in his memoir, and even Justice Antonin Scalia once publicly exclaimed: "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"

The idea that sometimes the threat was so great that authorities had no choice but to set aside even deep cultural taboos was promulgated by the most powerful people in the nation.

The lesson from that debate was that there are times when the government has to, as Vice-President Dick Cheney famously described it, "take off the gloves". What wasn't decided was the criteria the nation would use to decide when that "time" was.

Today we are in a different world.

Economic Justice

No longer is the nation obsessed with the terrorism threat. Guantanamo is rarely mentioned. Osama bin Laden is dead. The president has declared that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" have ended. A few stalwart civil libertarians are still fighting in the courts, but the nation's attention has turned to a new threat - economic injustice, income inequality and political corruption. And they are taking their grievances into the streets all over the country.

So far, there have been few clashes between the Occupy forces and the police, although Oakland and New York have both seen some dramatic confrontations and the events at the UC campus in Berkeley last week were downright brutal. There have been many arrests, however, and some of the communities are starting to react unfavourably to the demonstrators, demanding that the occupations disperse. The big question for everyone is what will happen if they don't.

Arick concluded his Harper's report with an ominous observation:

"Each year, some 76 million people join our current 6.7 billion in a world of looming resource scarcities, ecological collapse and glaring inequalities of wealth; and elites are preparing to defend their power and profits. In this new era of triage, as democratic institutions and social safety nets are increasingly considered dispensable luxuries, the task of governance will be to lower the political and economic expectations of the masses without inciting full-fledged revolt. Non-lethal weapons promise to enhance what military theorists call 'the political utility of force', allowing dissent to be suppressed inconspicuously."

The United States has never had fully militarised police before, armed with the kind of high-tech surveillance and weaponry that would never be allowed if the National Guard were called up in an emergency. And neither have we ever had such a malleable definition of what constitutes an emergency. At a time of increasing citizen unrest, it's a volatile combination.

Certainly the government seems to have been preparing for such confrontations for some time now.

Whether the people will accept high-tech "pain compliance" to "modify" dissent remains to be seen. If the attitude towards Tasers is any guide, many won't have a problem with it and "enhanced interrogation" of terrorist suspects has become, at best, a moral grey area for many in the US.

We have essentially normalised torture and created a high-tech police apparatus with more capability than any military in history. Human nature suggests that if you build it, they will use it.

Heather Digby Parton writes the political blog Hullabaloo.

Police Or Paramilitary Forces?

The Militarization of American Law Enforcement 

As police violently crack down on protests across the US, we look at the increasing influence of military technology on domestic police forces. 

By Amy Goodman and Stephen Graham and Nermeen Shaikh 
November 16, 2011 
Courtesy Of "AlterNet"

The following is an edited transcript of a Democracy Now! segment in which Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh discuss the militarization of America's police force. 

After a wave of raids across the country in which police in riot gear broke up  Occupy Wall Street encampments and arrested protesters, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan acknowledged in an interview with the BBC that she participated in a conference call with officials from 18 cities about how to deal with the Occupy movement. As police forces violently crack down on protests across the United States and Europe, we look at the increasing influence of military technology on domestic police forces. Stephen Graham is professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K. His book is, "Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism." "Why the Occupy movement is so powerful, what it’s demonstrating, is that by occupying public spaces around the world — and particularly these extremely symbolic public spaces — it’s reasserting that the city is the foundation space for democracy," Graham says. 

Stephen Graham, welcome to Democracy Now! Could you say a little bit about what the significance of your findings in the book were regarding the Occupy movements, in the U.S. particularly?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Yes, well, the book really tries to look at the ways in which police forces are increasingly using sort of military ideas and military tactics at the domestic scale to confront particularly mobilizations in cities, such as the Occupy movements that we’re talking about here, and how those tactics and ideas and, increasingly, technologies have very close links, very big security-industrial complexes, to the moves in the military towards a really intense focus on cities and on counterinsurgency tactics in sort of war zone cities such as Baghdad and Kabul.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In a CNN article that appeared yesterday, the author talks to a police officer who reports that now the kind of equipment that’s accessible to the police includes machine guns, tasers, and also that larger and mid-sized police departments in the U.S. now have access to tanks. Can you say something about how this happened?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Well, there’s been a longstanding shift in North America and Europe towards paramilitarized policing, using helicopter-style systems, using infrared sensing, using really, really heavy militarized weaponry. That’s been longstanding, fueled by the war on drugs and other sort of explicit campaigns. But more recently, there’s been a big push since the end of the Cold War by the big defense and security and IT companies to sell things like video surveillance systems, things like geographic mapping systems, and even more recently, drone systems, that have been used in the assassination raids in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and elsewhere, as sort of a domestic policing technology. It’s basically a really big, booming market, particularly in a world where surveillance and security is being integrated into buildings, into cities, into transport systems, on the back of the war on terror.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, talk about the issue of surveillance, whether we’re talking about how the Occupy movements are being watched, surveiled, monitored. Very interesting to hear Oakland Mayor Jean Quan say on the BBC that they’re coordinating—and they are coordinating with the FBI, they’re coordinating with Homeland Security—in dealing with these movements. So, talk about the surveillance apparatus, something you know very well from Britain, and name names. What are the corporations involved?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Well, there’s a whole variety of corporations linked to university research departments, linked to large-scale data-mining companies, linked to companies like Raytheon, who most people know of as making missile systems. Increasingly, they run border surveillance systems for things like the airline security and so on, which is a big thing in Europe and North America. But the key point really here is that surveillance is being used to try and track activist groups, permanently sort of monitoring them, using video systems, using database systems, and to allow infiltration. These are very much seen as movements that need to be infiltrated. In the U.K., there’s been a big scandal because of undercover police going into activist movements across Europe—green movements, social movements and so on—with a view to sort of basically being informers and spies to allow police to sort of crack down on what is effectively completely legitimate democratic activity.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: What do you think the significance is, Stephen Graham, of the fact that protesters across the U.S.—and it’s been true in Europe, as well—are increasingly characterized as somehow criminal—drug addicts or sexual predators—or somehow a sanitation or a health hazard to the communities in which they’re protesting? Can you say a little bit about how this works?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Well, in the book and elsewhere—other authors are writing these things, too—I think it’s important to put this debate in the bigger context of how cities have changed. And cities in the last 20 or 30 years, particularly in North America, have become much more sanitized, much more controlled by questions of zero tolerance, by questions of really aggressive policing, to clear out those that are deemed to be sort of not fitting a model of urban life, which centers on consumption, which centers on business. So there’s been a really powerful shift in cities to sort of criminalize homelessness, to criminalize panhandlers, to criminalize those not seen to belong in this—what Neil Smith in New York has called the "revanchist city," the city taking back spaces for the wealthy, effectively. That was very much Mayor Giuliani’s strategy.

So, in a way, I think what the Occupy movement is so powerful at is demonstrating that by occupying public spaces around the world, and particularly these extremely symbolic public spaces, it’s reasserting that the city is the foundation space for democracy. And we have to reassert that symbolically and with the actual groupings of the activists in space. So the internet is not enough. It’s very much necessary to reassert that cities are political spaces which need to be used to mobilize social and political change.

AMY GOODMAN: And you talk about how the population centers have so dramatically shifted, not only in the United States, but around the world, to the cities. And it’s that question we’ll end with, Stephen Graham.

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Absolutely. Well, I mean, last year, we moved past the moment where 50 percent of the world was living in cities. By 2050, 75 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities. But too often, political and military power is controlled by people who see cities purely as threats, purely as sites of unrest, sites that need strong military and security control. And what’s so wonderful about the Occupy protests is that there’s a different, a much more hopeful idea of cities being pushed there, in a world where we have a really radical crisis and a radical sense of illegitimacy for the social model that we’re all still having to live under.

AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Graham, I want to thank you for being with us. His book is called Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism.

U.S. Paramilitary Policing Is A Disaster

The Police Chief Who Oversaw Seattle's Crackdown On WTO Protesters Learned The Dangers Of Militarization. 

By Norm Stamper 
November 17, 2011 
Courtesy Of "AlterNet"

They came from all over, tens of thousands of demonstrators from around the world, protesting the economic and moral pitfalls of globalization. Our mission as members of the Seattle Police Department? To safeguard people and property—in that order. Things went well the first day. We were praised for our friendliness and restraint—though some politicians were apoplectic at our refusal to make mass arrests for the actions of a few.

Then came day two. Early in the morning, large contingents of demonstrators began to converge at a key downtown intersection. They sat down and refused to budge. Their numbers grew. A labor march would soon add additional thousands to the mix.

“We have to clear the intersection,” said the field commander. “We have to clear the intersection,” the operations commander agreed, from his bunker in the Public Safety Building. Standing alone on the edge of the crowd, I, the chief of police, said to myself, “We have to clear the intersection.”

 Why?

Because of all the what-ifs. What if a fire breaks out in the Sheraton across the street? What if a woman goes into labor on the seventeenth floor of the hotel? What if a heart patient goes into cardiac arrest in the high-rise on the corner? What if there’s a stabbing, a shooting, a serious-injury traffic accident? How would an aid car, fire engine or police cruiser get through that sea of people? The cop in me supported the decision to clear the intersection. But the chief in me should have vetoed it. And he certainly should have forbidden the indiscriminate use of tear gas to accomplish it, no matter how many warnings we barked through the bullhorn.

My support for a militaristic solution caused all hell to break loose. Rocks, bottles and newspaper racks went flying. Windows were smashed, stores were looted, fires lighted; and more gas filled the streets, with some cops clearly overreacting, escalating and prolonging the conflict. The “Battle in Seattle,” as the WTO protests and their aftermath came to be known, was a huge setback—for the protesters, my cops, the community.

More than a decade later, the police response to the Occupy movement, most disturbingly visible in Oakland—where scenes resembled a war zone and where a marine remains in serious condition from a police projectile—brings into sharp relief the acute and chronic problems of American law enforcement. Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, US police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: the NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”

The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country.

Much of the problem is rooted in a rigid command-and-control hierarchy based on the military model. American police forces are beholden to archaic internal systems of authority whose rules emphasize bureaucratic regulations over conduct on the streets. An officer’s hair length, the shine on his shoes and the condition of his car are more important than whether he treats a burglary victim or a sex worker with dignity and respect. In the interest of “discipline,” too many police bosses treat their frontline officers as dependent children, which helps explain why many of them behave more like juvenile delinquents than mature, competent professionals. It also helps to explain why persistent, patterned misconduct, including racism, sexism, homophobia, brutality, perjury and corruption, do not go away, no matter how many blue-ribbon panels are commissioned or how much training is provided.

External political factors are also to blame, such as the continuing madness of the drug war. Last year police arrested 1.6 million nonviolent drug offenders. In New York City alone almost 50,000 people (overwhelmingly black, Latino or poor) were busted for possession of small amounts of marijuana—some of it, we have recently learned, planted by narcotics officers. The counterproductive response to 9/11, in which the federal government began providing military equipment and training even to some of the smallest rural departments, has fueled the militarization of police forces. Everyday policing is characterized by a SWAT mentality, every other 911 call a military mission. What emerges is a picture of a vital public-safety institution perpetually at war with its own people. The tragic results—raids gone bad, wrong houses hit, innocent people and family pets shot and killed by police—are chronicled in Radley Balko’s excellent 2006 reportOverkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America.

It is ironic that those police officers who are busting up the Occupy protesters are themselves victims of the same social ills the demonstrators are combating: corporate greed; the slackening of essential regulatory systems; and the abject failure of all three branches of government to safeguard civil liberties and to protect, if not provide, basic human needs like health, housing, education and more. With cities and states struggling to balance the budget while continuing to deliver public safety, many cops are finding themselves out of work. And, as many Occupy protesters have pointed out, even as police officers help to safeguard the power and profits of the 1 percent, police officers are part of the 99 percent.

There will always be situations—an armed and barricaded suspect, a man with a knife to his wife’s throat, a school-shooting rampage—that require disciplined, military-like operations. But most of what police are called upon to do, day in and day out, requires patience, diplomacy and interpersonal skills. I’m convinced it is possible to create a smart organizational alternative to the paramilitary bureaucracy that is American policing. But that will not happen unless, even as we cull “bad apples” from our police forces, we recognize that the barrel itself is rotten.

Assuming the necessity of radical structural reform, how do we proceed? By building a progressive police organization, created by rank-and-file officers, “civilian” employees and community representatives. Such an effort would include plans to flatten hierarchies; create a true citizen review board with investigative and subpoena powers; and ensure community participation in all operations, including policy-making, program development, priority-setting and crisis management. In short, cops and citizens would forge an authentic partnership in policing the city. And because partners do not act unilaterally, they would be compelled to keep each other informed, and to build trust and mutual respect—qualities sorely missing from the current equation.

It will not be easy. In fact, failure is assured if we lack the political will to win the support of police chiefs and their elected bosses, if we are unable to influence or neutralize police unions, if we don’t have the courage to move beyond the endless justifications for maintaining the status quo. But imagine the community and its cops united in the effort to responsibly “police” the Occupy movement. Picture thousands of people gathered to press grievances against their government and the corporations, under the watchful, sympathetic protection of their partners in blue.

Norm Stamper was Seattle’s police chief from 1994 to 2000, and a police officer for 34 years. He is a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and the author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing. He wrote this article for the Nation.