Free Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko

generally conservative, anti-Castro, anti-Communist Cuban immigrants. Liberals tended to line up behind Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, and the Justice Department, who were trying to enforce the Eleventh Circuit ruling.
    Then-presidential candidate George W. Bush declared that “the chilling picture of a little boy being removed from his home at gunpoint defies the values of America.” Bush would go on to win the presidency, a position from which he would order heavily armed SWAT teams to raid AIDS and cancer patients who used medical marijuana in states that had legalized the drug for medicinal purposes. The conservative Washington Times compared the INS agents to the Nazi brownshirts in the movie Schindler’s List . And conservative bomb-thrower (and drug war cheerleader) Ann Coulter deplored “the predawn raid with masked, machine-gun-toting federal agents” breaking into a private home.
    Yet as Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page pointed out, heavily armed INS SWAT teams had been breaking into private homes and businesses to snatch up nonviolent but undocumented immigrants for years, thanks to policies passed and funded by the Republican Congress, and with the full support of anti-immigration conservatives. 40 Meanwhile, on the left, former Clinton solicitor general Walter Dellinger pointed out that of course SWAT teams like the one in the González photo look scary. That’s the whole point. “A great show of force can often avoid violence,” Dellinger said on ABC’s This Week . “It allowed [the INS agents] to get in and out in three minutes. . . . Look again at that iconographic picture and you will see that Mr. Dalrymple . . . is stunned by the officer in his display of a weapon. . . . His jaw goes slack, his arm loses its grip, and that avoided a physical tug-of-war.” 41 Slate writer Will Saletan explained that the INS agents were “heavily armed because Justice Department officials had heard there might be weapons in the house. They were wrong. But they weren’t reckless.” 42 These are the very same justifications SWAT teams across the country give for conducting violent, heavily armed raids on people suspected of nonviolent drug crimes.
    As police militarization began to creep beyond the drug war into other police actions in the 1990s, the country’s major political ideologies continued to react through the prism of partisan affiliation. When George W. Bush moved into the White House in 2001,conservatives stopped caring about police heavy-handedness (though there were a few exceptions). Progressives then rose up to decry the raids on medical marijuana clinics and the disproportionate use of SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics against minority groups, on immigration raids, and at political protests.
    Both sides were capable of righteous anger when the opposing party was in power and using big guns to enforce policies they found objectionable. And at the same time, both sides were more than willing to endorse the use of heavy-handed police tactics on their political opponents. It’s a trend that continues today, and further enables domestic police militarization to continue to flourish.

    I N 1989 A FRIEND ASKED P ETER K RASKA IF HE WANTED TO TAG along for a US Coast Guard exercise on Lake Erie. 43 Kraska is a criminologist at the University of Eastern Kentucky; his students describe him as demanding, whip-smart, and, in the words of one female student, “a strangely hot lumberjack.” He agreed to go along, mostly out of curiosity. While on that trip, Kraska learned that the Coast Guard worked closely with the US Navy on drug interdiction efforts. The Navy itself would intercept boats or ships that fit drug courier profiles, but would then have Coast Guard personnel on board to conduct the actual searches, seizures, and arrests. One Coast Guard officer flatly admitted to Kraska that the procedure was a way of getting around the Navy’s policy prohibiting its personnel from participating in civil