Police militarization has largely been fueled by the drug war, so this book also owes a debt to Dan Baum, whose meticulously reported Smoke and Mirrors is the be-all, end-all history of the drug war through the 1990s.
I should also acknowledge Peter Kraska, whose scholarly research on SWAT teams has provided the empirical data to document this trend. Thanks also to my agent, Howard Yoon, and my editor at PublicAffairs, Brandon Proia, for getting this specific book into print. So I owe a lot of thanks to the people who have helped make that happen.įirst, of course, thank you to my family and friends who have supported and encouraged me over the years. I’ve always felt that I’d never officially feel like a writer until I could see a book I’d written sitting on my bookshelf. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. And under Trump, these powers were expanded in terrifying new ways, as evidenced by the tanks and overwhelming force that met the Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.
Nixon’s War on Drugs, Reagan’s War on Poverty, Clinton’s COPS program, the post-9/11 security state under Bush, Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit-which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers.
Today’s armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other-an enemy. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement.
The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny.
0 kommentar(er)
