-Caveat Lector-
>From www.free-market.net/spotlight/police/
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When good cops go bad
October 28, 1999
Not too long ago, as a series of disturbing revelations about the conduct of
federal agents during the Waco fiasco began to ooze into public view, Mario Paz
found himself rendered into a lifeless exclamation point to concerns about
modern American law enforcement.
Paz, a 65-year-old grandfather scraping by in an unsavory Los Angeles
neighborhood, was at home in bed when police officers blew the locks off his
front and back doors, tossed in stun grenades, and stormed through his home.
Police then shot Paz dead in his bed. The police were looking for a neighbor
who was allegedly dealing drugs.
It would be reassuring to dismiss Paz's death as a mistake, although a lethal
one, but Paz is hardly the first person to suffer at the hands of wayward
police officers. His name joins Pedro Oregon Navarro, a Mexican immigrant
killed by Houston police in a botched and illegal raid; Amadou Diallo, killed
in a hail of official-issue bullets on a New York City street; and Donald
Scott, a millionaire gunned down by agents from the Los Angeles Sheriff's
Department and five federal law-enforcement agencies. Add Nelson Robles to the
list; he survived his encounter with confused DEA agents who raided his home.
Widely separated geographically and in the characteristics of the victims, such
raids share two distinguishing qualities: The use of overwhelming and often
lethal force by the agents of law and order, and the fact that they are almost
always carried out in the name of the war on drugs.
The Cato Institute's Diane Cecilia Weber examined the recent transformation of
law enforcement in "Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in
American Police Departments." She found that American officialdom's frenzy to
enforce drug prohibition had led Congress to loosen traditional restrictions on
the use of military resources by civilian police departments. The result has
been a flood of training and materiel that is increasingly transforming peace
officers into occupation troops on America's streets.
That transformation has meant a world of difference to all too many Americans.
Where civilian police officers are members of a community that they patrol and
where they try to maintain order, soldiers are tasked to destroy an enemy.
Police knock on your door; soldiers kick it in.
When restraints are dropped on the deployment and use of force, those who
suffer the most are usually those who were alienated from the center of power
to begin with, and have the fewest resources with which to resist. The result
has been disaster for many minority communities. While the ranks of the victims
of abusive power are salted with middle-class and even wealthy white Americans,
a disproportionate number of the fallen are poor blacks, hispanics, and
immigrants like Mario Paz.
The problem has grown to the point that Amnesty International, which normally
focuses its attention on countries led by generals, commissars, and presidents-
for-life, released a report on "Race, Rights, and Police Brutality" in the
United States. Human Rights Watch chimed in with the almost simultaneous
"Shielded from Justice" city-by-city breakdown of police excesses. The two
reports put big-city mayors and police brass on the immediate defensive.
Less lethal, but still troublesome, is the adoption of pseudo-scientific
"profiles" that police use to catch drug smugglers on the nation's highways.
While the specific criteria of such profiles are tightly held secrets, their
implementation in the field is such that being pulled over for matching the
profile is often referred to as "driving while black." Such profiling is now
falling into disfavor because of the overt racial implications, but it hasn't
ceased by any means. The American Civil Liberties Union has been tracking some
of the worst offenses and compiles its findings in "Arrest the Racism."
The puritanical crusade against drugs bears much of the blame for what has
happened to American law enforcement -- and civil liberties -- but the problem
now extends further. Perceived threats from terrorism and privately owned
firearms have joined the ranks of excuses for tougher, meaner, and more brutal
law enforcement. It's as if the new tactics and toys have acquired their own
momentum, and now just need to fasten on to convenient justifications.
Police abuse is nothing new, but the militarization of law enforcement has
taken an old, chronic problem and turned it into a plague on the body of
American society.
As horrible as headline-grabbing tragedies like Waco are, they may serve up
some small benefit by turning public attention to the unfortunate
transformation of the relationship between Americans and cops-turned-occupation
troops in their midst. If that warning is taken seriously, maybe we can avoid
adding more names to the list below "Mario Paz."
For updated information, browse the resources to the right or click over to the
Freedom Network Directory on Police Conduct.
http://www.free-market.net/directorybytopic/police/
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http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-050es.html
Warrior Cops
The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in
American Police Departments
by Diane Cecilia Weber
Diane Cecilia Weber is a Virginia writer on law enforcement and criminal
justice.
Executive Summary
Over the past 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply
intelligence, equipment, and training to civilian police. That encouragement
has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American law enforcement.
The 1980s and 1990s have seen marked changes in the number of state and local
paramilitary units, in their mission and deployment, and in their tactical
armament. According to a recent academic survey, nearly 90 percent of the
police departments surveyed in cities with populations over 50,000 had
paramilitary units, as did 70 percent of the departments surveyed in
communities with populations under 50,000. The Pentagon has been equipping
those units with M-16s, armored personnel carriers, and grenade launchers. The
police paramilitary units also conduct training exercises with active duty Army
Rangers and Navy SEALs.
State and local police departments are increasingly accepting the military as a
model for their behavior and outlook. The sharing of training and technology is
producing a shared mindset. The problem is that the mindset of the soldier is
simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer. Police officers
confront not an “enemy” but individuals who are protected by the Bill of
Rights. Confusing the police function with the military function can lead to
dangerous and unintended consequences—such as unnecessary shootings and
killings.
Briefing Paper No. 50 (PDF format, 14 pp. 73 Kb)
| Briefing Papers Series | Cato Institute Library | Cato Institute Home
© 1998 The Cato Institute
Please send comments to webmaster.
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