Free Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko Page B

act as liaisons between the police and military to set up the training—our go-between. . . . We’ve had teams of Navy Seals and Army Rangers come here and teach us everything. We just have to use our judgment and exclude the information like: “at this point we bring in the mortars and blow the place up.” 45
    The commander added that he had received a letter from a four-star general expressing concern about the sort of training the department was getting. Back in the 1850s, the Cushing Doctrine had allowed federal marshals to summon US troops to enforce domestic law. More than a hundred years after the controversial policy was repealed by the Posse Comitatus Act, federal marshals were now soliciting elite US military personnel again—not to enforce domestic law themselves, but to teach civilian police officers how to enforce the laws as if they were in the military.
    Perhaps most disturbing was Kraska’s finding that these paramilitary police teams and aggressive tactics were increasingly being used even for regular patrols. By 1997, 20 percent of the departments he surveyed used SWAT teams or similar units for patrol, mostly in poor, high-crime areas. This was an increase of 257 percent since 1989.
    SWAT proponents argued that all of this buildup was in response to a real problem—after all, violent crime had soared in the 1980s and early 1990s. But the SWAT teams weren’t generally responding to violent crime. They were usually serving drug warrants. When Kraska and colleague Louie Cubellis compared changes in violent crime rates to changes in the use of SWAT teams in the jurisdictions they surveyed, they found that only 6.63 percent of the rise in SWAT deployments could be explained by the rising crime rate. 46
    Kraska’s findings prompted a surge of media interest in the phenomenon of police militarization. The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, National Journal , and ABC News all covered Kraska’s study—and also ran their own investigations into the issue. But nothing really changed. Politicians and policymakers didn’t seem to notice—or if they did, they didn’t much care. Kraska noted the fizzling out of the issue in a self-deprecating footnote in a book he edited a few years later. “What exactly all this media attention accomplished is not quite clear. It resulted in no fame, no money, and no appreciable difference in the phenomenon itself.” 47 Of course, that wasn’t Kraska’s fault. Congress, state legislatures, and other politicians either weren’t paying attention or just didn’t find the reports particularly troubling.
    In fact, the phenomenon only continued to pick up momentum. The year before Kraska’s reports were published, Congress had passed the National Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997, the biennial bill to fund the Pentagon. One provision in the bill created what is now usually called “the 1033 program,” named for the section of US Code assigned to it. The provision established the Law Enforcement Support Program, an agency headquartered in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Its mission? To further grease the pipeline through which hard-core military gear flows to civilian police agencies.
    It certainly accomplished its mission. In its first three years, the office handled 3.4 million orders for Pentagon gear from 11,000 police agencies in all fifty states. By 2005, the number of police agencies serviced by the office hit 17,000. National Journal reported in 2000 that between 1997 and 1999 the office doled out $727 million worth of equipment, including 253 aircraft (notably, six- and seven-passenger airplanes and UH-60 Blackhawk and UH-1 Huey helicopters), 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, and 1,161 pairs of night-vision goggles. 48
    With all that military gear, plus the federal drug policing grants and asset forfeiture proceeds, just about anyone running a police department who wanted a SWAT team could now afford to start and