by Radley Balko
Inexcusable perhaps, but not inexplicable. Since Seattle, this had become the template. At the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, police conducted peremptory raids on the homes of protesters before the convention had even started. Police broke into the homes of people known to be activist rabble-rousers before they had any evidence of any actual crime. Journalists who inquired about the legitimacy of the raids and arrests made during the convention were also arrested. In all, 672 people were put in handcuffs. The arrest of Democracy Now journalist Amy Goodman was captured on a widely viewed video. She was charged with “conspiracy to riot.” That charge against Goodman was later dropped. So were the charges against most of the others arrested. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported the following February that charges were dropped or dismissed for 442 of the 672 people arrested.88
There were similar problems at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Police in Denver showed up for the protests decked out in full riot gear. One particularly striking photo from Denver showed a sea of cops in shiny black armor, batons in hand, surrounding a small, vastly outnumbered group of protesters. The most volatile night of the convention featured one incident in which Jefferson County, Colorado, deputies unknowingly clashed with and then pepper-sprayed undercover Denver cops posing as violent protesters. The city later paid out $200,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that a Denver SWAT team was making indiscriminate arrests, rounding up protesters and bystanders alike.89
Perhaps the best insight into the mentality the police brought to the DNC protests could be found on the T-shirts the Denver police union had printed up for the event. The shirts showed a menacing cop holding a baton. The caption: DNC 2008: WE GET UP EARLY, TO BEAT THE CROWDS. Police were spotted wearing similar shirts at the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago.90 At the 1996 DNC convention in Chicago, cops were seen wearing shirts that read: WE KICKED YOUR FATHER’S ASS IN 1968 . . . WAIT ’TIL YOU SEE WHAT WE DO TO YOU!
This default militaristic response to protest of overkill was then given an extended national stage during the Occupy protests of 2011. In the most infamous incident, now forever captured in countless Internet memes and mashups, Lt. John Pike of the University of California–Davis campus police casually hosed down a peaceful group of protesters with a pepper-spray canister. But that was far from the only incident. Police across the country met protesters in riot gear, once again anticipating—and in too many instances seemingly even craving—confrontation. In Oakland, the skull of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen was fractured by a tear-gas canister that the police had fired into the crowd.91 In New York, NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-sprayed a group of helpless protesters who had been penned in by police fencing.92
One thing the Occupy crackdowns did seem to do was focus renewed attention on police tactics and police militarization. Big-picture stories about the Pentagon buildup, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding for antiterror gear, and the proliferation of SWAT teams started streaming out of media outlets, giving the militarization issue the most coverage it had received since Kraska’s studies came out in the late 1990s. Part of that was due to social media. The ubiquity of smart phones and the viral capacity of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and blogs were already bringing unprecedented accountability to police misconduct and government oppression, be it a Baltimore cop screaming obscenities at a kid on a skateboard, a transit cop in Oakland shooting a man who lay handcuffed on his stomach, or government paramilitaries in Iran gunning down a young woman in cold blood during Arab Spring democracy protests. But the Occupiers, who tended to be young, white, and middle- to upper-middle-class, knew social media like few other demographics. They knew how to live-stream video directly to the Internet. They all had smart phones, so police couldn’t suppress incriminating video by confiscating one or two or ten phones—someone was bound to have video of not only the original incident but also of police trying to confiscate phones to cover it up.
The political reaction to the Occupy crackdowns was interesting to watch. In the 1990s, it had been the right wing—particularly the far right—that was up in arms over police militarization. Recall the outrage on the right over Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the raid to seize Elián González. The left had largely either remained silent or even defended the government’s tactics in those cases. But the right-wing diatribes against jackbooted thugs and federal storm-troopers all died down once the Clinton administration left office, and they were virtually nonexistent after September 11, 2001. By the time cops started cracking heads at the Occupy protests, some conservatives were downright gleeful. The militarization of federal law enforcement certainly didn’t stop, but the 9/11 attacks and a friendly administration seemed to quell the conservatives’ concerns. So long as law enforcement was targeting hippie protesters, undocumented immigrants, suspected drug offenders, and alleged terrorist sympathizers, they were back to being heroes.
Steven Greenhut, a conservative-leaning columnist for the Orange County Register and editor of the investigative journalism site CalWatchdog, was dismayed by the right’s reaction. “What’s really disgusting is the natural instinct of so many conservatives to stick up for the police,” Greenhut wrote. “They don’t like the Occupy protesters, so they willingly back brutality against them, without considering the possibility that conservatives at some point might be on the receiving end of this aggression.”93
Unfortunately, consistent voices like Greenhut’s have been rare. Partisan reaction to aggressive police actions against opponents tends to fall somewhere between indifference and schadenfreude.
After the December 2012 shooting massacre in Newtown, Connecticut put the issue of gun control back into the political discourse, some progressives again dredged up the right’s criticism of the ATF in the early 1990s. In one lengthy segment, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow aired old footage from Waco and Ruby Ridge while making some tenuous connections between gun rights politicians and activists and Weaver, McVeigh, and Koresh. She referred to a “conspiracy-driven corner of the gun world’s paranoia about federal agents,” without paying much heed to the fact that the ATF was inflicting the same sort of abuse on suspected gun offenders that Maddow herself has decried when used against suspected undocumented immigrants or Occupy protesters. More tellingly, Maddow added that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to give more power to the ATF based only on the politics of the people opposed to doing so. “Sometimes the character of the opposition defines why something ought to be the most politically viable thing in the world,” she said.
But even before Newtown, progressives have been advocating for the use of more government force against political factions they find unsavory. In 2009 the Department of Homeland Security issued a controversial report on what the author—DHS analyst Daryl Johnson—called a resurgence of right-wing extremism and the threat it posed to domestic security. The report was widely criticized on the right and was eventually criticized and revoked by DHS secretary Janet Napolitano. But after a spate of mass killings in the following years by assailants with political views that in some cases could loosely be characterized as right-wing, Johnson became something of a progressive hero. Most of the incidents involved clearly mentally ill attackers whose politics were all over the place. Even Johnson acknowledged that the incident most in line with his thesis—the massacre at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, by a white supremacist named Wade Michael Page—was the work of a “lone wolf” attacker and likely would not have been prevented by the recommendations in his report.
Still, he was celebrated on the left. The progressive advocacy group Media Matters declared him “vindicated.” Similar sentiment popped up on progressive outlets like ThinkProgress, Salon, Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC blog, and Democracy Now.
In truth, attacks by groups on the fringes of the right wing have actually dropped in recent years, despite some claims that they’ve increased in response to the election of a black president. Attacks from groups on the fringes of the left wing are in decline too, as are alleged attempted terrorist
attacks by fringe Muslim groups.94
In a 2012 interview with the Idaho Spokesman Review, Johnson showed why it may not have been such a great idea for progressives to embrace him simply because he wanted to shut down opinions they found distasteful. Johnson was interviewed for an article on the twentieth anniversary of the Ruby Ridge fiasco, and he took one step further Rachel Maddow’s idea of supporting government force simply because you don’t like the factions opposing it. Johnson in fact suggested that merely having concerns about police militarization is a worry only borne by extremists. In fact, he appeared to have suggested that even recognizing that militarization is happening is an indication of fringe extremism.
“For American extremists, the siege at Ruby Ridge symbolizes the ‘militarized police state,’” said Johnson. The US government, through its Department of Homeland Security in particular, he said, “has unintentionally fostered, and even solidified, Orwellian conspiracies concerning an overzealous, oppressive federal government and its perceived willingness to kill to ensure citizen compliance. . . . In the minds of modern-day extremists, [Homeland Security] has enhanced the lethal capability of many underfunded, small-town police forces through its grant programs.” Using federal grants, state and local law enforcement agencies have been able to buy expensive equipment and training that are “commonly associated with the military,” he said, adding that “extremists view such a security buildup as a continuation of the Ruby Ridge legacy.” That legacy is a continuing drumbeat for extremists and white supremacists who recruit with the message of “big government versus the little guy” and “the government set me up.” These extremist ideas continue as messages and even recruiting themes among various radical groups in the United States, Johnson said.95
I attempted to contact Johnson to ask if he’d like to clarify his comments. He didn’t return my calls. As they stand, these quotes are striking, particularly from someone who once worked for the Department of Homeland Security and now runs a consulting firm that works with law enforcement agencies. They certainly appear to dismiss police militarization—a phenomenon documented by a wide range of media outlets and criticized by interests all across the political spectrum—as merely a fantasy cooked up by extremists to boost their recruiting. Incidentally, the publications and advocacy groups who have recently expressed concerns about police militarization include ThinkProgress, Wired, Salon, MSNBC, and Democracy Now—all of them also ran articles praising Johnson.
So long as partisans are only willing to speak out against aggressive, militarized police tactics when they’re used against their own and are dismissive or even supportive of such tactics when used against those whose politics they dislike, it seems unlikely that the country will achieve enough of a political consensus to begin to slow down the trend.
JUST AS WITH BILL CLINTON, THERE WAS HOPE AMONG progressives that Barack Obama would take a more conciliatory, less militaristic approach to the drug war. And just as with Bill Clinton, Obama has come up short. According to a tally by Current TV, by the end of his first term, Obama had overseen more federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in four years than George W. Bush had presided over in eight. Obama also stepped up immigration raids and continued the raids on doctors and pain clinics suspected of overprescribing opioids. He continued to encourage Mexico’s policy (aided by US foreign aid and weapons) of fighting its drug war with the military, despite the horrifying carnage caused by that policy. And as previously discussed, Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress re-funded the Byrne grant and COPS programs that contributed to the rise in SWAT teams and multi-jurisdictional antidrug and anti-gang task forces—and at record levels.
The 1033 program has also soared to new heights under Obama. In its October 2011 newsletter—which carries the revealing tagline “From Warfighter to Crimefighter”—the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), the agency that oversees the Pentagon giveaways, boasted that fiscal year 2011 was the most productive in its history—by a lot. “FY 11 has been a historic year for the program,” wrote LESO program manager Craig Barrett. “We reutilized more than $500M, that is million with an M, worth of property in FY 11. This passes the previous mark by several hundred million dollars. . . . Half a billion dollars in reutilization was a monumental achievement in FY 11 but I believe we can exceed that in FY 12.”96
The take in 2011 alone was equivalent to about 18 percent of the total value of the equipment the program had given away in its history. In fiscal year 2011, the program gave away eight hundred Humvees, a 700 percent increase over 2010. In Los Angeles County, the sheriff’s department put four semi-trailers on standby so that as a new piece of desirable war gear became available, the department could be en route to pick it up before another police department could claim it. The investigative journalism site California Watch reported that by 2011 the department was taking in $3 to 4 million worth of military gear annually, including “M16 rifles, helicopters, microwaves, survival kits, workout equipment, bayonet knives, [and] ammunition cans.” During the record year for 1033 in the state as a whole, California police agencies raked in over 163,000 total items in 2011 worth over $26 million, “from bath mats acquired by the sheriff of Sonoma County to a full-tracked tank for rural San Joaquin County.” Police in San Joaquin County had already purchased a $500,000 armored “mobile command center” with a DHS grant. California Watch reported that in “Rio Dell—a small Humboldt County town with just four full-time officers, not including the chief—the police department has used the program to pick up two vehicles [and] two M-16 rifles.”97
In Richland County, South Carolina, Sheriff Leon Lott was so pleased with his new acquisition that he posed with it, along with his SWAT team, and then put out a press release. He called it “The Peacemaker,” explaining in his release that “the Bible refers to law enforcement in Matthew 5:9, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.’” The “Peacemaker” is an M113A1 armored personnel carrier. The vehicle moves on tanklike tracks and features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds. Richland County includes the city of Columbia and its northern suburbs. It’s also home to the University of South Carolina. What it isn’t is a battlefield.
According to Charles Earl Barnett, a US Marine veteran and retired police major who has served on several United Nations and NATO military and peacekeeping missions, a .50-caliber machine gun is “completely inappropriate” for domestic police work. It “causes mass death and destruction,” Barnett told me in 2008. “It’s indiscriminate. I can’t think of a possible scenario where it would be appropriate.”98
But Richland County isn’t the only jurisdiction that can fire off rounds of that size. Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona, also has a gun that shoots .50-caliber ammunition. So does Chattanooga, Tennessee; Anne Arundel County, Maryland; and Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In Bossier Parish, Louisiana, the .50-caliber gun is mounted to an armored vehicle that the sheriff calls his “war wagon.” At least after the sheriff’s department in Faulkner County, Arkansas, used nearly $12,000 in asset forfeiture funds to purchase a .50-caliber gun, they had the good sense to decide they shouldn’t use it. “It shoots through buildings,” Sheriff Karl Byrd told a local newspaper. “There is absolutely no legitimate law enforcement use of this rifle.”99
There have been at least a few other voices of sanity. In Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick ordered the state’s police agencies to stop using the program pending an investigation, after a Boston Globe report found—well, basically what similar investigations all over the country had found. From the Globe:
Police in Wellfleet, a community known for stunning beaches and succulent oysters, scored three military assault rifles. At Salem State College, where recent police calls have included false fire alarms and a goat roaming the campus, school police got two M-16s. In West Springfield, police acquired even more powerful weaponry: two military-issue M-79 grenade launchers.100
In June 2012, the Pentagon suspended the e
ntire 1033 program—not because of any concern about the militarization of civilian policing, but because of recent press reports of mismanagement by some of the participating law enforcement agencies. An Arizona Republic investigation had found that the Pinal County sheriff’s department transferred some of the Pentagon equipment to nonpolice agencies, and was planning to sell some other equipment at auction. A broader AP report found that police departments had kept poor records about their use of the equipment obtained through the program, including high-powered weapons that could no longer be accounted for. As of November 2012, however, the program was back up and running.
Finally, the Obama administration has continued to defend in court the use of military-like violence to enforce the drug laws. In Avina v. US, DEA agents pointed their guns at an eleven-year-old and a fourteen-year-old during a mistaken drug raid. The agents had apparently misidentified the license plate of a suspected drug trafficker for the plate on a car owned by Thomas Avina, the father of the children. The Obama administration argued in federal court that the lawsuit should be dismissed before even being heard by a jury—that the agents’ actions were reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Of course, it’s not at all unusual for an administration to defend the actions of federal drug agents. But this was an administration whose drug czar had suggested that perhaps it was time to tone down the battle rhetoric that government officials often used when enforcing the drug laws. He was right about that. But on the front lines, the administration was arguing in court that there’s nothing unreasonable about government agents pointing guns at the heads of children whose parents are suspected of drug crimes—and that even when said gun-pointing is done in the service of a mistaken raid, the agents should be shielded from any liability.101