Posse Comitatus – Repealed but Not Gone
2013-10-26 · Guest: Radley Balko (Investigative reporter and author) · 8:44
The Militarization of American Police Forces
Bob Zadek interviews investigative reporter Radley Balko about his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop. They discuss the historical separation of military and police power in the U.S., the significance of the Posse Comitatus Act, and how modern policing has adopted military equipment, tactics, and mindsets.
Topics: Militarization of police, Posse Comitatus Act, SWAT, civil liberties, criminal justice reform, Fourth Amendment
Speakers: Bob Zadek — Host Radley Balko — Investigative reporter and author of The Rise of the Warrior Cop
The Founding Principles of Policing [00:27]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. I’m your host, Bob Zadek. Every Sunday at noon at Talk 910, thanks so much for listening. 910 on your AM dial—you probably already know that—www.talk910.com on your computer dial. Thanks so much for listening. We are the only live libertarian show on the radio all weekend and the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area. 800-345-5639 to join the conversation and to share your point of view. Thanks so much for listening.
When our country was founders—was founded—back in 1787, if there was one principle, if there was one principle that the founders held dear more than any other, it was the principle that the police power, the power to protect us and protect our rights, vested in the states and in the communities. There was not then, and there was never to be, a federal police force. Policing was the most local of activities. Nothing could have been clearer.
In after the Civil War, with an absence of organized government in the Southern states, there was a period of time that federal troops were assigned to the Southern states to maintain law and order. That was done out of absolute necessity and it was abhorrent to most Americans. In 1878, shortly after the end of the Civil War, the Posse Comitatus Act was enacted, which ended forever, we hoped, the use of the US military to enforce state laws. And that was the end of it.
Or was it? Are we now living in a society where, in effect—underline “in effect”—we have a federal police force? Sure, we have local policemen who are hired locally, but has the system deteriorated so that local police look like the military, act like the military, and carry out missions dictated by Washington to enforce federal criminal law, so that there’s been a bleeding of military—militarism into local police forces? So while we still have in terms of the payment of salary, it’s paid by local government, but who runs the show? Do we still have local policemen acting like local policemen, or has everything changed?
Introducing Radley Balko [03:58]
Bob Zadek: Radley Balko has written a very important book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, subtitled The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Randy is with us today for the whole hour. 800-345-5639 if you wish to discuss these issues with Randy—Radley, sorry. And Radley is a senior writer and investigative reporter for the Huffington Post. He’s been cited in, I think, two US Supreme Court cases for his investigative journalism. He’s written extensively in Reason magazine. He was a policy analyst at Cato. Radley, welcome to the show and thanks so much for joining us.
Radley Balko: Oh, sorry. Thanks for having me. Good to be on.
Bob Zadek: Ah, there you are, Radley. Sorry. Sorry for the technical problem. Thanks so much for writing your book and thanks so much for joining us on the show. Now Radley, in my opening, I worried about the merging of both mission and appearance of the military on the one hand, which is designed to attack and protect us from our enemies, and local police forces, which are supposed to look like cops and act like cops and carry out an entirely different mission. Is that overstating the case?
The Blurring Line Between Cop and Soldier [05:41]
Radley Balko: Well, no. I mean, I think as you mentioned, for the most part in US history, we’ve done a good job of keeping the military out of domestic law enforcement and we have the tradition of doing that. There have been a few exceptions, but for the most part we’ve done that. But no, I think you’re right, and this is what I argue in the book, is that maybe we don’t have active duty troops who do domestic policing, but what we have are domestic police officers who look and act and are armed like soldiers.
And it’s not only that. I mean, we’ve given them the weapons of soldiers. We’ve given them the equipment of soldiers, like tanks and armored personnel carriers and helicopters. We’ve given them the uniforms of soldiers. A lot of police departments have switched from the police blues to these battle dress uniforms, or BDUs as they call them. And we’ve trained them in military tactics with the SWAT raids and the military lingo.
And then we’ve sent them out on the street and we regularly tell them that they’re fighting various wars, whether it’s a war on drugs or crime or terrorism. So if the importance of the distinction between police and military is that a soldier’s job is basically to annihilate a foreign enemy—to kill people and break things, basically—a police officer’s job is to keep the peace and protect our rights. But if we continue to treat cops as if they’re soldiers, that distinction starts to get blurred. And then you have cops who start to see themselves as soldiers and start to see the neighborhoods and streets that they patrol as battlefields and the people that they’re supposed to be serving as potential enemies or potential threats.
Bob Zadek: The point you make in your book quite forcefully is that—and one of the important takeaways for me was—there was a time in most of my life that I didn’t view at all the policeman as somebody to be feared by me. Of course, if I was making an illegal left turn, I was white-knuckled fearful that I would get caught, but putting aside the occasional illegal left turn, I was sort of—I felt better that the police were around. And as you point out in the book, that whole relationship between those who are supposed to be protected by the police, or feel protected, and the police who are supposed to be the protectors—that core relationship between protector and protected has changed. It’s all different now. And that was a point in your book.
Radley Balko: Yeah, well, I think—I mean, I think there’s a little bit of a danger of sort of romanticizing a time that may have never existed. I think there probably was a time when people like you didn’t fear the police…