Sometimes You Can't Tell the Cops from the Soliders These Days

Recent revelations that officials in the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney debated, and thankfully turned down, an internal suggestion to have U.S. troops arrest terrorism suspects and US citizens residing in Buffalo should not be a surprise to those who have observed and are alarmed at the growing militarization of the domestic police.
 
Ronald Reagan's initial success in having Congress whittle away at the clear demarcation between police and military functions under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 got the ball rolling as a major component of the so-called war against drugs, reveals Peter Kraska, a professor in criminal justice and police studies at Eastern Kentucky University.
 
"The trend has definitely intensified," the academic told me over the phone, since he helped edited the book, Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police, which was published in 2001 before the events of 9/11. Alleged terrorism has since its publication become an additional rationale for what the academic calls an "unprecedented" amount of training and weaponry that the military has handed over to law enforcement since the early 1990s.
 
Helping to facilitate this, two Canadian academics, Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty, argue in one of the essays in the Kraska book (The Military Technostructures of Policing) is a 1994 agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Defense that involved the development of technology of benefit to both the police and the military. One result was the creation of five law enforcement technology centers designed to apply advanced war-fighting technology to criminal justice, they wrote.
 
The most high-profile example of this convergence is the increased usage of "no knock" warrants by police SWAT teams dressed in military-style uniforms on even routine calls at people's homes that have frequently resulted in tragic results for those inside. The officers involved may receive their training from U.S. Navy Seals or U.S. Army Rangers, explains Kraska.
 
Yet sadly, the American public in some cities appear to have accepted the introduction of military-style equipment and technology into law enforcement, reports the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a daily newspaper in Texas. These include in some cases armed personnel carriers, assault rifles, noise-flash devices and grenade launchers.
 
The dangling of federal money under various presidential administrations, including the latest, as an incentive to purchase this equipment (some of which had to find new customers outside the military with the end of the Cold War with the Russians) is one reason why this ramp-up of might has occurred at the local domestic level, says Kraska, even though "a good percentage of the police institutions don't care for this whole militarization trend,"
 
So, why is a blogger reporting on this for an IT publication devoted to local government? Well, there have been media reports of the military serving as "the central organizing force" (Kraska's words) in the collection of data on civilians in joint police/military projects.
 
"These are programs where the military and local police forces work in conjunction with one another to collect data and put that data into a centralized military database."
 
As Haggerty and Ericson explained in 2001 and which is even more valid today, much of what police officers do involves the documentation of a myriad of events and situations.

Yet for institutional cultural reasons, the police have resisted taking full advantage of sophisticated database systems and tools after they have been installed on their premises, relates Peter Manning, who holds the Elmer V. H. and Eileen M. Brooks chair in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston. He is also the author of the book Technology of Policing: Crime Mapping, Information Technology and the Rationality of Crime Control which was published in 2008.

"No police department (that I know of) has refined a systematically integrated collection of technologies to facilitate problem solving, crime prevention, policy analysis or community interfaces."
 
So, why shouldn't the police turn to the military which, after all, has the computer, communications and surveillance technology smarts since they invented and developed much of this stuff?
 
The obvious answer is that that a key role of the military is to kill enemy's forces as effectively as possible, while the mission of law enforcement is to protect society while applying the minimum amount of force necessary. It would be a shame if military technology and practices are applied as overkill (both literally and figuratively) to domestic populations with the ostensible aim of creating safe communities.