Blurring Posse Comitatus: The Increased Militarization of Police

That is the second in my collection of posts on the social prices of drug prohibition. You’ll be able to learn the primary submit right here.

In 1878, Congress handed Title 18 U.S.C. §1385, generally often known as the Posse Comitatus Act, to deal with the query of utilizing the navy for the needs of civilian legislation enforcement. Earlier makes use of of the navy, reminiscent of to quell rioters through the Whiskey Riot (1791 – 1794), led to catastrophe, prompting legislators to ban using navy personnel to implement home legislation, besides in outlined circumstances. The underlying difficulty with utilizing the navy for such functions lies in its operate; as a result of troopers are educated to neutralize or remove the issue, issues of due course of or civil liberties will not be their paramount concern (Marsh, 1991). In implementing home legislation, civilian police departments ostensibly should safeguard civil liberties whereas implementing the legislation.

Nonetheless, these strains have grow to be more and more blurred within the prosecution of the Battle on Medication™.  In 1981, the Navy Cooperation with Regulation Enforcement Act (MCLE) was handed to permit the navy to cooperate with native legislation enforcement to extra vigorously pursue the interdiction of traffickers. MCLE allowed the navy to increase police entry to navy bases, analysis, and tools, in addition to present coaching on using navy tools (Cooper, 2015).  Clinton’s 1997 enlargement of transfers to native departments within the type of the 1033 program gave choice to departments engaged in counter-drugs and counterterrorism actions. Subsequent legal guidelines, such because the Protection Drug Interdiction Help Act of 2011 offered for much more help from – and cooperation between – the navy and native legislation enforcement within the title of resolving the transmission, sale, and use of prohibited medicine.  

Not solely have state and native legislation enforcement availed themselves of kit and intelligence, however they’ve additionally adopted the mannerisms and methods of battle operations through the formation of elite paramilitary Particular Weapons and Techniques (SWAT), Particular Response Groups (SRT) and Police Paramilitary Items (PPU) models. These models have been as soon as an outlier, with their roots in incidents such because the Watts riots and the Texas Bell Tower shootings within the late Sixties (MacDonnell, 2016). The thought behind these models was for them to behave as a drive of final resort in conditions the place regular models could be incapable of responding, particularly cases during which suspected criminals have been more likely to be closely armed. Whereas the unique SWAT crew shaped by Los Angeles Police underneath the management of Officer John Nelson and future police chief Inspector Daryl Gates captured the general public creativeness, they largely remained an anomaly previous to 1973.

The declaration of struggle in opposition to medicine created a confluence of pursuits that incentivized these paramilitary police models. Now, not solely are they a staple of main metropolitan police departments, however many smaller departments additionally make use of them as effectively. At the very least 90% of departments serving inhabitants of not less than 50,000 residents have established some form of SWAT or PPU unit. It’s not all that stunning, as the need to divert enforcement sources to align with Washington’s mission to remove medicine ends in a windfall of free-to-low-cost tools, coaching, and knowledge sharing. As an added bonus, this paradigm is self-perpetuating; the much less efficient interdiction and neighborhood cleaning efforts are, the larger the justification to spend extra redoubling these efforts. 

It should be famous that regardless of the huge variety of sources afforded these models, solely a small variety of officers obtain this coaching and grow to be a part of them, and many who do finally rotate again to common responsibility. Therein lies the issue; as these officers who’ve been educated to see traffickers, suppliers and customers as enemies to be defeated on the hostile terrain that’s their communities mix again into common models, their perspective has been noticed to vastly affect their fellow officers. Williams and Westall (2003) discovered that regardless of the distinction within the probability of suspect violence between requires SWAT and non-SWAT officers, the distinction in use of deadly drive between the 2 teams is negligible.

On this method, policing has veered away from the mannequin of crime prevention to one in every of arrest maximization. With protecting the peace having given method to searching for out confrontation, avenues to create this confrontation have expanded, from “no-knock” dwelling raids to site visitors stops concentrating on potential drivers carrying giant quantities of money. This confrontational strategy, fairly naturally, escalates the probability of violence, a topic that will likely be lined in larger element later.  Some students estimate that SWAT models are deployed at a conservative estimate of 60,000 time per yr, with 62% of these deployments executing warrants associated to drug offenses, usually utilizing methods reminiscent of no-knock raids. Paramilitary police models have additionally been used patrol high-crime areas in full riot gear, exacerbating the picture of communities underneath siege.

In my subsequent submit, I’ll flip to the problem of civil asset forfeiture.