The New York Review of Books: “Military hardware not only makes civilian cops look like soldiers; it makes them more likely to act like soldiers, too.”

From a story by Michael Shank in The New York Review of Books headlined “How Police Became Paramilitaries”:

Military might has always paraded in America’s streets. But it wasn’t until this century that it became an often daily presence. In the 2000s, local law enforcement agencies began to adopt the type of military equipment more frequently used in a war zone: everything from armored personnel carriers and tanks, with 360-degree rotating machine gun turrets, to grenade launchers, drones, assault weapons, and more. Today, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment—most used, some new—has been transferred to civilian police departments. . . .

This Defense Department initiative, known as the 1033 program, requires that law enforcement agencies make use of such equipment within a year of acquisition, effectively mandating that police to put it into practice in the public space. The Department of Homeland Security also has a terrorism grant program that has given tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to local police forces to purchase military equipment directly.

There have been efforts in Washington to scale back the Pentagon program in particular. On Capitol Hill, Senators Brian Schatz (Democrat of Hawaii) and Rand Paul (Republican of Kentucky) have repeatedly introduced a bipartisan bill, known as the Stop Militarizing Our Law Enforcement Act, in multiple congresses. . . . In 2015, President Obama did put restrictions on what could be transferred by the Pentagon from war zone to police forces, weeding out some of the most excessive weaponry. . . .

Military hardware not only makes civilian cops look like soldiers; it makes them more likely to act like soldiers, too. Wall Street Journal reporter Radley Balko’s work documenting the rise of the “warrior cop” is indispensable: he has showed how this warrior mentality, which gained momentum thanks to no-knock Drug Enforcement Agency home raids, leads to the dangerous othering of civilian “targets.”. . .

The good news is that in some places police and protesters are talking to each other—without riot gear and without MRAPs and assault weapons drawn. In Fort Worth, police were shaking hands and hugging protesters. In Portland, police and demonstrators took a knee together in a show of solidarity—though some have argued that after the taking-a-knee photo op, police returned to escalating violence. In Atlanta, the police chief was on the streets talking to protesters, sharing her view that what had happened in Minneapolis was absolutely unacceptable. In several US cities, police officers are joining protesters for prayers.