Chapter 1.docx

Chapter 1. in the 1990s, Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University published an article on the “militarization of the police.” Essentially, his argument was that all police officers were becoming SWAT officers and that the United States wasslipping into a police state. Having been a part-time poli...

Chapter 1. in the 1990s, Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University published an article on the “militarization of the police.” Essentially, his argument was that all police officers were becoming SWAT officers and that the United States wasslipping into a police state. Having been a part-time police officer for over eight years, I thought to myself: “This is a bunch of baloney. I bet he’s never ridden in a squad car.” I considered writing a rebuttal article, but I was busy writing a book on the mental health and criminal justice system (Klein, 2009). Therefore, I put the article aside. When I completed my book, I felt compelled to write a critique of Kraska and his colleagues’ work. I published two articles on the subject (Klein, 2005a, 2005b). In 2009, my book on the mental health and criminal justice system was pub-lished. I then began to work on a book on police socialization. In 2010, Christopher Cooper published an article on the militarization of the police in the journal, Police Forum. I called the editor of Police Forum and asked him if he was interested in a critique of Cooper’s article. After he agreed, I began writing the critique. I quickly realized that the Cooper article was a condensation of a longer paper entitled, “Overkill,” written by Radley Balko in 2006. Balko was a journalist employed by the Cato Institute, which is a right-wing, libertarian think tank. I began going through the Cooper and Balko material line by line and writing my critique. When I completed my analysis of Cooper’s article, I had written almost 60 pages. This was double the length of the usual academic article. I then began to write an analysis of Balko’s paper. The critique of his work was 40 pages. I realized that if I added my two earlier articles concerning Kraska, which were 25 pages each, I had written half of a book. Consequently, I wrote an introduction and used the two articles concerning Kraska for Chapters 2 and 3 of this book. Except for some new data, I left my original argument unchanged. In Chapters 4 and 5, I analyze Cooper and Balko’s work using more up-to-date research. Recently, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a study on the militarization of the police (with the help of Mr. Balko). This study is critiqued in Chapter 6. During my research, I discovered that there was a larger issue I needed toexamine. SWAT teams had been created to deal with hostage-takers, barricaded subjects, and other emergency situations. However, most SWAT raids today do not involve these types of calls. Instead, SWAT teams are primarily deployed for drug raids. Kraska, Cooper, Balko, and the ACLU have railed against mistakes made by SWAT teams during these drug raids. However, my thought was to ask: Why were there so many drug raids, and why did they primarily occur in poor, minority neighborhoods? Chapter 7 has an examination of why there is such a close correlation amongrace, poverty, and drugs. The data indicate that drug use had not increased over the last several decades. However, incarceration for drugs had increased over 500 percent. This has primarily affected low-income black and Hispanic neigh-borhoods. Some have argued that this is the product of a new public ideology, neoliberalism. Neoliberalism’s premise is to free markets at the top and oppress those at thebottom. That is, punish people for their poverty (and drug abuse). Therefore, I undertook a statistical analysis of indicators of poverty, crime, and drug arrests. In Chapter 7 I present this analysis and it indicates that poverty does not correlate with drug arrests. However, it finds that the state arrests and incarcerates many black and Hispanic citizens for drug possession (which is a symptom of poverty). However, it does not directly punish them for their poverty. As the author was completing his manuscript, the riots in Ferguson, Missouri,occurred. From all of the news reports, this appeared to be an example of the militarization of the police. In other words, this was the exception to the rule. The author read about the riots and watched many hours of coverage on CNN and other cable channels. However, before writing Chapter 7 on Ferguson, the author was able to interview one of the local police commanders in the St. Louis area who had been involved in the riots. The commander explained that the media and others had misunderstood the situation in Ferguson. To the media, it had looked like a war zone. In actuality, it was a riot, a riot in which the police were fired upon 150 times each night. The police use of armored vehicles and tear gas was defensive. They were used to protect the officers and to have officers avoid firing upon or fighting with the demonstrators. In fact, in spite of the images portrayed in the media, the police had acted with restraint and no one was killed in the riots. As the author was working on the Ferguson chapter, riots broke out inBaltimore, Maryland. Again, the police looked militarized in their response. The author then interviewed a Baltimore police commander who had been involved in the riots. He stated that the department’s lack of response was the product of lack of preparation, lack of leadership, or political pressure. In other words, for whatever the reason, they too, had used restraint and again, no one was killed in the riots. This is emphasized in Chapter 9. Some might view this analysis as pro-police. It is not. In fact, it is simply ananalysis of a poor social science formulation. To make that explicit, the author analyzes three cases in Chapter 10 in which civilians were killed by the police for no apparent reason. The civilians were Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner. Most of this book deals with violence. In Chapter 11, the author presentsseveral programs and techniques that can be used by the police to avoid violence between themselves and citizens. In Chapter 12, I reiterate the idea that the police are not soldiers. They do notwork in units to attack the enemy. Instead, they work alone or in pairs to arrest those who break the law. Simply, then, the notion of the militarization of the police is wrong. It should be eliminated from discussions of the police. Radley Balko said during an interview that SWAT raids rarely go bad, but,if they do go bad, they are very, very bad. Balko, however, did not discuss the SWAT raids or police actions that went well. Instead, he has exclusively focused on those instances that went bad. Why did he do this? That is because he has an agenda. He has an anti-police agenda driven by a right-wing libertarian political perspective. I do not have any agenda. I am merely attempting to do a fair and balanced analysis of SWAT team actions. Or, more generally, I am analyzing the role of the police in American society—a role that primarily consists of order maintenance and “keeping the peace.”